AWS temporary files before uploading to S3?

Question

My Laravel app allows users to upload images. Currently, when the user uploads their images, they are stored in a temporary location on the server. A cron job then modifies the uploaded images (compresses them, etc.), and uploads them to S3. Any temporary files older than 48 hours that failed to upload to S3 are deleted by another cron job.

I've set up an Elastic Beanstalk environment, but it's occurred to me that storing uploaded images in a temporary directory on an instance is risky because instances can be created and destroyed when necessary.

How and where, then, would I store these temporary files so that they're not at risk of being deleted by an instance?

user_8877418 · Answer

S3 has a feature called object lifecycle management you can use to have files deleted automatically by setting them them to expire 2 days after they're uploaded.

You can either:

A) Prefix the temporary files to put them in an S3 psuedo-folder (i.e., Temp/), apply the object lifecycle expire rule to that specific prefix (or "folder"), and use the files in there as a source of truth for the new files derived from it post-manipulation.

or

B) Create an S3 bucket specifically for temporary files. Manipulate the files from there and copy to the production bucket.

AWS temporary files before uploading to S3?

2 Answers