Lambda - XML to PDF convertor

Question

Hi All

I have a few servers that are EOL and I'm looking at moving the solution to a serverless.

These servers simply use Java 7 and Open Office 4.0 to convert a dumped xml file into a pdf file so upgrading to new OS and using hardware seems pointless.

My plan was originally to utilise and API gateway, S3 bucket, SQS queue and Lambda function to accomplish this although I'm a little new to serverless solutions and have been trying to find the correct way to achieve this.

I found an article I tried to follow using Pulumi and AWS, but to be honest was over complicated to follow and couldn't understand where to deploy the suggested code via Pulumi to create all required resources in AWS.

I was hoping for a simpler solution that one of you clever people may know of, using a friendlier step by step guide to follow without using Pulumi to accomplish this, so please all suggestions welcome if anyone has a better suggestion?

Appreciate any guidance on this matter.

Many thanks

Mark

Answer

Hi MarkB,

It is ideal to use the following, to get a serverless alternative to your existing application:
- API gateway, for exposing API endpoints
- S3 bucket, for input and output file storage
- SQS queue, for asynchronous processing
- Lambda function, for application to convert file
- DynamoDB, to keep track of processed files and metadata [Optional]

To achieve this you don't necessarily need to use Pulumi, as it is a developer-friendly IaC tool to ease things out.

If you are not comfortable with IaC, you can start by creating an architecture in which you want the processing to be done, and then manually configure resources and application code using AWS Console to set things up.
And, if everything works as expected, then you can optionally, try to convert it to a CloudFormation template or CDK/Pulumi code.

For developing such architecture, you can refer to these resources:
- [Serverless Reference] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/building-scalable-serverless-applications-with-amazon-s3-and-aws-lambda/
- [Serverless Web Application Guide] https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/hands-on/build-serverless-web-app-lambda-apigateway-s3-dynamodb-cognito/
- [Example 1] https://towardsaws.com/building-an-event-driven-image-resizer-using-aws-s3-sqs-and-lambda-894ff455e12
- [Example 2] https://programmaticponderings.com/2019/10/04/event-driven-serverless-architectures-with-aws-lambda-sqs-dynamodb-and-api-gateway/

Please let me know in case you need any guidance related to specific resources/configuration/architectural components.

Hope this helps.

Thanks!

Lambda - XML to PDF convertor

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