Better understanding of Wagtail media serving, especially re: Heroku?

[Allan Berry]

Hi there, first post.

Wagtail seems pretty terrific; I've managed to get it installed and running on Heroku using this tutorial.

I'd like to better understand how Wagtail manages static and media files.  Can anyone indicate some good resources?  I have experience with vanilla Django, so technical explanations are fine.

The tutorial specifies Whitenoise for static files, which seems to work, even if I don't quite understand the Whitenoise pipeline.  Out of the box, Wagtail has some default settings for production media files.  Heroku doesn't seem to complain on this score, although I've not yet setup any media fields.

My project may be media-heavy, although it's hard to anticipate.  Should I work toward getting an S3 or GCS backend for media storage?  Should I be concerned about using Whitenoise?

One thing I have learned: Heroku and Django-Compressor don't get along.  What are best-practices for a pre-processing pipeline for static files?  I'd like to use Browserify and React.js at some point.