Event Notifications for Amazon S3 | Hacker News Reader

Event Notifications for Amazon S3

aws.amazon.com

61 pointsdegio20 comments

I was very excited when I saw this headline, as for a while I've hosted various things on s3 and have wanted an easy way to track when/how/by whom those things have been downloaded. Alas, that isn't a supported...I'm looking for something like: "s3:ObjectViewed:Get". Or am I mistaken and that already exists in some other form...?

S3 already has a feature where you can configure per-bucket apache style access logs which log every operation and may solve your purpose. This feature provides realtime messaging for uploads.

I'll take it! Good to know.

Of all the features that S3 has shipped, this is by far my favorite. I look forward to utilizing Lambda and S3 to build an ultra cheap content management service to drive the cost of my website management to less than a $1/mo.

You could definitely kill shared hosting services (with static sites) with this sort of offering. They could never compete at S3 pricing.

How is this idea any better (and cheaper) than a static site generator like Jekyll?

Nice feature, but, again, not available in CloudFormation. I understand the challenge to coordinate releases, I can live with a week or two lag, but usually it's months - CloudFormation still doesn't support basic AWS services. I really am considering abandoning this gem, which is highly neglected and underutilized. Terraform [1] looks like something I can extend myself easily if the upstream doesn't support something just yet and contribute it as a pull request.

[1] https://terraform.io/

Too bad they did not differentiate between Create and Overwrite (as far as I can tell) as that is a an important difference (I need to solve scenarios where idempotency is needed - more than 1 worker may create exact same email message due to fault tolerance design, but at least AND at most 1 email should be sent to customer. I was hoping that the s3 filename/key would be the unique identifier and if there was separate notification for overwrite than from create, email could be sent only for create event only.)

You could use S3 versioning to distinguish the two operations.

S3 versioning could be pricey and painful. Try deleting a versioned bucket! I wrote a tool that I'm gonna open-source if my employer okays it, but the pathetic part is that you get charged for each HTTP request - imagine a bucket with a billion objects and a gazillion versions!

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/multiobjectde...

That's the API I use as well. The DELETEs are free, but GETs, PUTs, POSTs, and LISTs are not [1].

[1] http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

If you're not in a huge hurry to delete the bucket you can easily set lifecycle rules to expire all versions older than 1 day (the minimum) and then just wait for S3 to delete them for you.

Very cool!

Are there any ordering guarantees for these notifications? Specifically the order in which objects were created? It would be nice to be able to generate a meaningful event log.

This is awesome, and the cost is pretty affordable. I don't know if the lambada feature was there before, but it's pretty cool!

Lambda was announced today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8602936

At first glance, this combined with Lambda would make for an awesome server-less image transformation setup.

Have I missed something or is there no way to get notified when an object gets deleted?

Not yet.

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