What's New in Appwrite's Storage

Appwrite comes with a robust storage service to help you manage files required for your application. Appwrite’s storage service provides API for uploading and managing files, manipulating images, getting image previews, and more. It has built-in security, access control using users, teams, and roles, built-in encryption, and antivirus scanning. Also, the image preview manipulation endpoint comes with caching to keep it efficient. With the release of Appwrite 0.13, we are adding more power to Appwrite’s already powerful storage service. We have introduced buckets to group files with additional configurations. We have improved efficient handling of large files and have introduced support for external storage services to use as Appwrites storage location. Let’s look at each of these new features independently

Appwrite is an open source backend-as-a-service that abstracts all the complexity involved in building a modern application by providing you with a set of REST APIs for your core backend needs. Appwrite handles user authentication and authorization, databases, file storage, cloud functions, webhooks, and much more! If anything is missing, you can extend Appwrite using your favorite backend language.

Buckets

With version 0.13 of Appwrite, we have introduced buckets. Buckets are simply a collection of files. If you have previously worked with Appwrite’s database service, buckets are similar to collections in database service. Buckets allow you to have additional control over your files. You can group files based on domain, type, or any other logic that suits your application using buckets. Buckets make file organization better. Not only that, buckets allow you additional control by specifying what type and size of files can go into it, whether or not to encrypt the files in the bucket and whether or not to scan files going into the bucket with antivirus. To learn more about buckets, visit our storage docs.

External Storage Support

Files are important and even important is to have them in a reliable storage. Appwrite 0.13.0 introduces support for AWS S3 and DigitalOcean spaces as a storage solution for Appwrite. So, if you want to, you can set any files uploaded to Appwrite storage to directly be uploaded to AWS S3 bucket or DigitalOcean spaces. In the upcoming days we will introduce support for more storage solutions so that you will not be limited to these two services. To learn more about setting up Appwrite to use S3 or DigitalOcean spaces, check out the storage environment variables docs.

Large File

There are many applications where we would want to use and store huge files. Appwrite 0.12, and the previous versions did not handle large files efficiently. From version 0.13, Appwrite handles the uploading and downloading of large files efficiently. You can now upload gigabytes of files easily using the chunked upload process. Appwrite uploads large files by breaking them into smaller chunks so that the server can handle them efficiently and the API is more robust and stable. Check out our blog post to learn more about implementing large file support.

Conclusion

Storage is an essential service for applications, and Appwrite, a back-end service, provides a practical storage service that you can use to manage your application files. And with the 0.13 version of Appwrite, the storage service adds more powerful features that will help you organize your files, play with large files for complex applications, and more. We hope these new features of Appwrite will open up a whole new domain of possibilities for developers out there. We can’t wait to see what you will build with it.