Using S3 events to trigger other AWS services

The S3 service can notify other services when certain things happen to objects in a bucket. Two of the most common scenarios are if an object was uploaded or if an object was deleted from a particular bucket. The S3 bucket can then notify one of three other AWS services of what has happened and the bucket where the event occurred. The three services that allow S3 event notifications are as follows:

• AWS Lambda
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
• Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)

You can arrange for notifications to be issued to SQS or SNS when a new object is added to the bucket or overridden. Notifications can also be delivered to AWS Lambda for processing by a Lambda function:

Figure 4.8 – S3 Event Flow

Let's think about this and how we would use this from a DevOps perspective. AWS Lambda is an extremely powerful tool that we will explore in detail in Chapter 12, Lambda...