News

Amazon S3 Object Lambda Now Generally Available

• By Gladys Rama
• 03/22/2021

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is making it easier for users to make customizations to their data as it's retrieved from Amazon S3 to be used by other applications.

The new S3 Object Lambda feature, now generally available, lets users run code against their data as it is transfered from Amazon S3 to another application. This is particularly useful for organizations that share their S3 data with many different applications, each with their specific requirements for how data is formatted.

Rather than building a proxy layer that transforms data as it leaves S3 or making multiple copies of that same data customized for each application that uses it, S3 Object Lambda lets users transform their S3 data on the fly using AWS Lambda functions.

S3 Object Lambda "allows you to add your own code to process data retrieved from S3 before returning it to an application," explained AWS evangelist Danilo Poccia in a blog post last week announcing its general availability.

The feature would make it easier to, for example, strip a dataset of customers' private information before using it for analytics, convert a dataset from XML to JSON, or add information from another service onto an existing dataset.

Using AWS Lambda functions, S3 Object Lambda can "automatically process and transform your data as it is being retrieved from S3," Poccia said. "The Lambda function is invoked inline with a standard S3 GET request, so you don't need to change your application code."

Using S3 Object Lambda is a five-step process, as described by Poccia:

1. Create a Lambda Function to transform data for your use case.
2. Create an S3 Object Lambda Access Point from the S3 Management Console.
3. Select the Lambda function that you created above.
4. Provide a supporting S3 Access Point to give S3 Object Lambda access to the original object.
5. Update your application configuration to use the new S3 Object Lambda Access Point to retrieve data from S3.

S3 Object Lambda is currently available in most AWS regions and can be accessed via the AWS Command Line Interface, Management Console or SDKs. More information is available here.