Building an Event-Driven File Processing Workflow with Amazon S3 and AWS Lambda
Learn how to automatically process files uploaded to Amazon S3 using AWS Lambda. This guide explains S3 event notifications, Lambda triggers, prefix filtering, error handling, monitoring, and security considerations for a simple event-driven workflow.
Introduction
Many applications need to perform an action whenever a new file is uploaded. For example, an application might resize an image, validate a document, extract metadata, or start a data-processing task after a file arrives.
Instead of continuously checking whether a file has been uploaded, we can build an event-driven workflow using Amazon S3 and AWS Lambda.
The basic architecture is:
User → Amazon S3 → S3 Event Notification → AWS Lambda → Processing
Amazon S3 can send event notifications when objects are created or deleted, and AWS Lambda can process those events. :chatgpt-content-reference{index="0"}
What Is Amazon S3?
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service.
Files stored in S3 are called objects, and objects are stored inside buckets. An object contains the file data along with metadata. :chatgpt-content-reference{index="1"}
S3 can be used to store many types of data, including:
- Images
- Documents
- Videos
- Backups
- Datasets
- Application files
For this example, imagine that users upload images to an S3 bucket.
What Is AWS Lambda?
AWS Lambda allows you to run application code in response to events without managing a traditional server.
Instead of constantly running a backend process, the application can invoke a Lambda function only when an event occurs.
In our example, Lambda will be responsible for processing information about a newly uploaded object.
Event-Driven Architecture
The workflow can be represented as:
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User
|
v
Upload a File
|
v
+-------------+
| Amazon S3 |
| Bucket |
+-------------+
|
| Object Created Event
v
+-------------+
| AWS Lambda |
| Function |
+-------------+
|
v
File Processing
|
v
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