Best approach for setting up AEM S3 Data Store

Question

We have an existing setup of AEM 6.1 which uses TarMK for data storage. To migrate the all assets to S3, I followed all steps here: https://docs.adobe.com/docs/en/aem/6-1/deploy/platform/data-store-config.html#Data%20Store%20Configurations (Amazon S3 Data Store). Apparently, the data synced to S3 but when I checked the disk usage report, I still see that assets are using disk space even for existing and newly added assets. What's the purpose of using S3 for assets if they still use the disk space? Or am I doing something wrong? How can I verify that my setup is really using S3? Here is my S3DataStore.config

accessKey="xxxxxxxxxx"
secretKey="xxxxxxxxxx"
s3Bucket="dev-aem-assets-local"
s3Region="eu-west-1"
connectionTimeout="120000"
socketTimeout="120000"
maxConnections="40"
writeThreads="30"
maxErrorRetry="10"
continueOnAsyncUploadFailure=B"true"
cacheSize="0"
minRecordLength="10"

Another question is: Do I need to do the same setup on publisher? Or is it ok just to do it on author and use publisher as is by replicating the binary data?

Answer 1

There are a few parts to your questiob so I'll break down the answer into logical blocks. Shout if I miss anything.

Your setup for migration is correct and S3 will use disk space. This is for the write-through cache.

AEM uses write-through cache for writing to S3 and all the settings for this cache are in your S3 config file. Any writes to data store are first written to this cache. Asynchronous background threads then uploaded to the S3 bucket. This mechanism makes AEM very responsive as it's not blocked by slow S3 writes. Also, data reads for recently written blobs are fast because they don't need slow reads from S3. In short, S3 IO traffic is too slow for AEM so this cache boosts the performance. You cannot disable it as it is required for asynchronous write to S3. You can reduce the size but it's recommended to be at least 50% of your S3 bucket size.

You can verify your S3 setup by looking at your logs for messages related to AWS (grep for aws).

As for publisher, yes you need to migrate from your old publisher to the new publisher. Assuming that you are not using binary-less replication, you will need a different S3 bucket for your publisher. In general, you migrate from author to author and publisher to publisher for a standard implementation.

Answer 2

You can also verify your S3 dat usage by looking at the S3 bucket and the traffic on it. If versioning is enabled on your S3 bucket all the blobs will show version stamping.

Async upload of blobs can be monitored from logs and IP traffic monitoring will show activities related to your S3 bucket. The most useful way is to see the network traffic between your AEM server and S3 end-point.