Should I create a separate file upload server besides main graphql server?

Question

I'm creating a mobile application with React Native which is going to heavily depend on file uploading in form of images and videos. Currently my GraphQL server is handling all the database interaction and I now want to add the functionality to upload images (right now only profile pictures, later videos). These files will be stored in a cloud object storage.
It would be quite easy to use apollo-upload-client in the mobile application and graphql-upload with my Apollo server to handle the uploading of files. But I'm not sure if I should create a seperate server which only handles the interaction with files so that my main server only needs to handle the DB jobs. File uploading would also add a huge amount of load to the main GraphQL server which needs to be super fast and responsive as most of the application depends on it.

I would be interested to hear other opinions and tips on this topic and if it's worth creating a seperate server for interaction with files.
Or even look into different languages like Elixir or Python to improve performance because we would also need to process and compress the videos and images to reduce their size.

Answer 1

IMO, if your final destination is cloud-based storage, you're going to be better off (and pay less) if you upload directly to the cloud. What I generally recommend is a 3-step process:

• mutation to create a signed upload URL (or signed upload form)
• Client uploads directly to the cloud (temporary location with TTL)
• mutation to process the form which contained the upload metadata (process and move to final location)

This especially gets interesting once you start handling multiple uploads, and figuring how to process them asynchronously while the user is filling out the rest of the form.