S3 buckets composition

Question

I'm developing CMS which runs as a single instance, but serves multiple websites of different users. This CMS needs to store files in storage. Each website can have either few images but also thousands of objects. Currently we serve around 5 websites, but plan to have hundreds, so it must scale easily.

Now I'm thinking about two possible ways to go. I want to use S3 for storage.

1. solution is to have single bucket for all files in my app
2. solution is to have one bucket for each website.

According to AWS docs, S3 can handle "virtually unlimited amount of bytes", so I think first solution could work well, but I'm thinking about other aspects:

1. Isn't it just cleaner to have one bucket for each website? Is it better for maintance?
2. Which solution is more secure, if so? Are there some security concerns to care about?
3. Is same applicable to other S3-like services like Minio or DigitalOcean Spaces?

Thank you very much for your answers.

Answer 1

I'd go for solution 1.

From a technical perspective there really is virtually no limit to the amounts of objects you can put in a bucket - S3 is built for extreme scale. For 5 websites option 2 might sound tempting, but that doesn't scale very well.

There's a soft-limit (i.e. you can raise it) of 100 buckets per region or per account, which is an indication that using hundreds of buckets is probably an anti-pattern. Also securing 100s of buckets is not easier than securing one bucket.

Concerning security: You can be very granular with bucket policies in S3 if you need that. You can also choose how you want to encrypt each object individually if that is a requirement. Features like pre-signed URLs can help you grant temporary access to specific objects in S3.

If your goal is to serve static content to end users, you'll have to either make the objects publicly readable, use the aforementioned pre-signed URLs or set up CloudFront as a CDN in front of your bucket.

I don't know how this relates to S3-like services.