Building A Serverless Screenshot Service with Lambda

1

Serverless

A client recently requested a feature involving screenshots of random URLs. Now, there are several services out there that will do this for you. Most of these services have interesting REST APIs and pricing models, but I really wanted to develop something with Serverless. So I took this opportunity to check it out.

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2

Phantomjs

For this project we will need some extra binaries ( PhantomJS in particular) to take the screenshots. We’ll also use ImageMagick, but that is provided by AWS by default in the Lambda image, so we don’t package it separately.

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3

Amazon CloudFront

Lastly, there will be a function that the app can call to get a list of all available thumbnail sizes. The app can use the returned URLs to present them to the end user and their browser will download it through CloudFront from S3.

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4

AWS CloudFormation

We use the stage-variables plugin so we can set stage variables in API Gateway, which we can then use in our Lambda functions. You can configure them in the custom section. This also allows us to use CloudFormation references inside our Lambda functions. CloudFormation will fill in the values with the actual output for us.

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5

Amazon API Gateway

The app posts to API Gateway, which triggers a Lambda function that will take the screenshot and upload it to the S3 bucket. It will then return the URL for the created screenshot.

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