Storing and Encoding Videos With Ruby on Rails, Lambda, and S3

A simple but scalable approach to adding video upload and processing functionality to your new app

Introduction

As user preference shifts from image to video based content, it has become more common for consumer apps to have to upload and reproduce video.

The need to deal with video over unreliable internet connections requires that video be processed upon upload and served (downloaded by others) in a quality commensurate with available bandwidth.

Several solutions have been developed to achieve these goals including SaaS offerings such as Mux and AWS Elemental.

Here, we will go over a simple approach that can work for both small and medium applications integrated to a custom backend but using AWS infrastructure for processing and serving of videos.

Overview

The approach we will develop will make use of 3 key components:

1. AWS S3: We will use S3 (with transfer acceleration) to provide a scalable and fast location to upload and store files to.
2. AWS Lambda: Will be used to re-encode the video files into any number of desired formats and quality.
3. Custom Backend: A Ruby on Rails (any language should work) backend to store metadata on the videos and serve to clients.

Uploads will follow a step similar of the one presented in the article below where the client requests a signed URL from the Rails backend and then uses the provided URL to directly upload the video file to S3.

Secure Uploads to AWS S3 with Ruby on Rails

Once uploaded, we will make use of an S3 Notification Event to trigger a Lambda to process the video. The resulting metadata (such as S3 key) will be saved to the custom backend. The resulting flow is depicted below.