How Distributed Systems Store Files: Databases, Object Storage, and the Trade-offs

What’s the right approach for storing a file? Should you store it in a database or in a blob storage service like S3? 🤔A few years ago, I ran into this exact question while designing a file upload service. After weighing the trade-offs, I chose object storage for scalability and cost.But that decision isn’t always obvious.Are there cases where storing files directly in the database is actually the better choice? 🤔In this article, we’ll break down both the approaches, explore their trade-offs, and look at how real systems decide between them.With that, let’s begin by defining the problem statement for our system.Subscribe nowProblem StatementWe want to build a web application that supports:File uploads with metadata (title, description, category).Retrieves recent uploads with image previews.The diagram below shows the application’s UI screen.File UploadRecent UploadsLet’s explore the simplest technique to solve this problem.Naive Solution - Store files in the databaseMost databases can…