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Creating an image app with ElasticSearch, S3, Lambda, React

What, why?

  1. I have all these images on all these computers
  2. Constantly trying to find a good one for my purposes
  3. Existing solutions suck for search, sorry
    • imgur fails to find my image for arcade river game and gives me trash for old computer
    • giffy only does gifs and it's search is much worse and it's slow as heck
    • I'm better at curating this than most of the internet apparently
    • I don't trust any of you (Dropbox, Google Photos, et al)
  4. Because I can

New tools for lazy application developers

Back before we had these platform services, speedily building this app would look like this.

  • Grab a familiar framework like Django
  • Build out a bunch of API views (likely with DRF)
  • A DB for auth maybe since not everyone should get to upload
  • But most of the writing is gonna be via ES so do that somehow
  • Hook up some storage solution so images go in the right place, can be retrieved
  • Include something (redis-queue, celery) to do async indexing
  • Build out a frontend, host that somewhere
  • Host the backend somewhere, Heroku to get all these services up and running fast
    • Elasticsearch
    • Redis/RabbitMQ
    • Django/WSGI
    • Postgresql
  • Pay money 24/7 for a server that is barely in use

This is how I made garbage.today

  • Defined a couple of API endpoints with Chalice
  • Made a really basic indexer function in Lambda
  • Made an S3 bucket that fires events to that indexer
  • Hooked up an ElasticSearch service
  • Wrote the world's simplest/dumbest SPA with create-react-app

The bad

The user experience AWS IAM - which is what you need to deal with if you are using their services - is not good. If it was designed by humans, I get the impression that they envisioned their users as having wronged them personally in some way.

This could be a post in itself, but let's review the seemingly dozens of ways you can cobble together a role with permissions in this world.

  • Sorta construct one in Lambda when you create the thing
  • Generate one automatically when you create a lambda function and hack it
  • Modify the ACL on the resource itself (ES, S3)
  • Write your own in any of these places (enjoy these enormous docs-as-prose)
  • Their "builder"

The fact they need a simulator is a good indication that they've failed to capture user intention in the various places used to configure access rights.