AWS S3 Object Lambda

Sorry last week’s post was late, this one took me more time than anticipated. I’ve been experimenting on AWS S3 Object Lambda.

Use cases:

So S3 Lambda objects are S3 Access Points, that means that you can interact with it using S3 API. At the moment I write those lines it only supports S3 GetObject. It can be useful when you need to provide S3 read only access to a customer.

The benefit will be when you have specific treatment to add to the file can’t be cached. For example you provide a file with PII and you need to obfuscate part of it depending the identity of the the requester, making creating caching quite ineffective, or maybe you want to add dynamic processing to an image.

The last use case I see is storing access logs to a specific S3 file as it’s downloaded using S3 API.

It’s a very narrow use, but can be interesting in some cases. I was very interested on this feature when I saw it because it looked really interesting, by testing it, it feels a bit not that useful. Maybe in the future the feature will be expended to really take its full potential.

Architecture as Point

I deployed mine using CDK, because it’s really the best way I know to deploy resources in AWS and I’m aiming to deploy all my applications using it because it helps keeping everything clean and neat.

Here again the feature is not mature, as you can see in the Stack code, it’s lot of overwork, we can create the object using Cfn attributes, but there really isn’t much help here.

I think unless you really need this feature, it’s better to wait a bit before considering it in production.

Conclusion

While the feature looks promising, in my opinion it still lacks a bit of features and helper to use and deploy consistently. I have little doubt that in the future it should expend and become a really useful feature.

What I’ld like to see before considering using this feature more:

• More details in the AWS Lambda event, like requester identity easily accessible.
• Better CDK implementation, allowing creating L3 constructs and updating AWS Lambda Role automatically