Media servers done right
In response to H asking me about how to set up a reliable, durable media server for Actual Archival, I realized I have half-assed answers based on organizing pirated media libraries, but no cohesive playbook for Doing The Whole Thing Right. Let's try to answer that question (in progress) here!
tl;dr you want a Content Management System (CMS)
This is the name for the type of software that solves this class of problem. This will represent an "out-of-the-box" solution, that will likely come with one limitation or another, but will answer your needs upto some limit. Options abound.
Bespoke solutions, or the long answer
There are many ways to divide up the problem
There's lots of ways to solve this problem. In each type of solution, a different thing becomes hard. This means that a lot of solutions you find in the space will
- use ambiguous terminology
- to refer to subtly different concepts
- that solve subproblems
- that are sometimes redundant and sometimes leave gaps.
This is one reason why the "cloud providers" are often so much nicer to use – they make opinionated decisions about how everything will be shaped under the hood, and make the whole thing available to you in a way that looks like what you're used to.
How I like to divide up the problem
Durable storage
Naming, addressing, and metadata
Searching and serving, i.e. how and where the data is accessed
Types of tool or service you might use for various components of the problem
- Metadata managers
- Content addressed storage (CAS)
- Network or web servers
- filesystems
- Network directories
- Network mounts
- Content management systems (CMS)