Can Magento use Amazon S3?

A clietns who is running 3 Magento eCommerce sites now asking us whether we would integrate with his sites and Amazon S3 for his increasing resource demands.

Since recently we are help a ERP Software Company for making a migration plan of Amazon services like EC2, S3, EBS, we can answer him based our knowledge for PHP + Zend Framewrok + Amazon Clooud Computing services (EC2, S3, EBS).

The question was:

As you know, I only sell digital products. All products are downloadable.

I am thinking of moving all the products over to Amazon S3 storage and was wandering how I'd connect magento.

I would be keeping magento on a normal Linux server. Is it possible to keep the magento setup I have and have all the downloadable products on S3?

Obviously the system needs to be secure and use some kind of query string authentication.

Do you know how to configure magento to do this?

And our answer is:

Generally, the Amazon S3 is not a internet disk, but a much simpler one. It just have simple authentication, just yourself or all user can download it (only two sorts of authentication), and you couldn't pass any parameter to secure your down-loadable resources, like adding a filter to check whether the user have buy it or not.

So the only solution would be you have to move the whole system on EC2 + EBS, but the performance would be not as good as some VPS, this is the discussion from the community.

Background articles:

1. Cloud computing with PHP, Part 1: Using Amazon S3 with the Zend Framework

2. Cloud computing with PHP, Part 2: Using Amazon EC2 with the Zend Framework