Put OpenCart images onto S3 instead of local disk

I need to customize OpenCart 1.5.6.1 so that images uploaded via the upload interface in the admin tools are put into amazon S3 instead of local disk. Then when the images are accessed (either in the admin interface, or the main webpage) the images are not fetched from local disk, but directly from S3. I want to be able to make open cart so its not dependent on the filesystem of the server. The database is on RDS, and if the images are stored on S3, then I dont have to worry about loosing the server, as I can easily bring up a new server and as long as it points to the S3 bucket and the RDS database, it should work. To start of the conversation, let me know if you think this will be easier to do using vqmod and a module/extension, or if it makes more sense to customize the core files of OpenCart. Happy Bidding.