Does this sound familiar? You’ve got 1000+ users who love to upload 4MB+ image files, and every image needs to be processed into several variations for thumbnails, previews, and mobile display. All that processing eats up RAM — and the more concurrent uploads you get, the more they wreak havoc on your servers.

As you scale, this process simply doesn’t work. Forget about putting more strain on your API servers, or running separate servers just to handle spikes without crashing. It’s time to go serverless. In this talk, we’ll review an elegant and indefinitely scalable solution that leverages AWS Lambda with some JS. As a serverless solution, it can handle *all* your processing tasks as they come in, still costing close to zero per image processed.

This talk provides the motivation and the method for offloading utility tasks to AWS Lambda. Even though serverless applications are the hottest thing nowadays, many dev teams still haven’t gotten their feet wet by deploying a simple Lambda utility function.

Image conversion is a widespread use-case that the majority of the audience will easily understand and have experience with. I believe this audience will easily be able to follow the implications and reasoning, and I aim to demonstrate that this is a cost-efficient way for any dev team to plan for burstable, on-demand traffic without the need to hoard (and pay for) additional server space.

NOTE: A hands-on workshop covering this topic is possible as well.