How to: Media access and storage
As we know, most of our storage space will be used for storing media files such as images, videos, or other files. Our media service will be handling both access and storage of the user media files.

But where can we store files at scale? Well, [object storage](https://karanpratapsingh.com/courses/system-design/storage#object-storage) is what we're looking for. Object stores break data files up into pieces called objects. It then stores those objects in a single repository, which can be spread out across multiple networked systems. We can also use distributed file storage such as [HDFS](https://karanpratapsingh.com/courses/system-design/storage#hdfs) or [GlusterFS](https://www.gluster.org).

_Fun fact: WhatsApp deletes media on its servers once it has been downloaded by the user._

We can use object stores like [Amazon S3](https://aws.amazon.com/s3), [Azure Blob Storage](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/services/storage/blobs), or [Google Cloud Storage](https://cloud.google.com/storage) for this use case.