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    Media Processing Pipeline

    User uploads land in S3 via pre-signed URLs. A worker pipeline (Lambda or ECS + FFmpeg) makes thumbnails, HLS, and virus-scan verdicts. Redis is the live job board the UI polls; Postgres stores the asset catalog. No binary ever streams through the API server.

    1K – 100Kusers supported
    $150 – $2,500/month infrastructure

    Architecture Diagram

    Interactive — hover over any node to see its role and description.

    UserAsset APIS3Raw + derivedSQSWorkerFFmpegRedisJob statusPostgreSQLCatalogCloudFrontUserAPIStorageQueueBackendCacheDatabaseFrontend

    Use Cases

    Course platforms and UGC video
    E-commerce product image variants
    KYC document images with scan + OCR
    Podcast / audio pipelines
    Game or app asset ingest

    Technology Stack

    frontend

    Next.jsdirect S3 upload

    backend

    Node.jsLambda / ECS workers

    database

    PostgreSQLRedis

    infrastructure

    S3CloudFrontSQSFFmpeg

    Scalability Roadmap

    Stage 1Images only users· Lambda + Sharp

    Thumbnails on Lambda. Redis job keys. Cheap and simple.

    Stage 2Video users· ECS FFmpeg

    Long jobs on ECS. SQS. HLS output.

    Stage 3Busy UGC users· GPU / MediaConvert

    AWS MediaConvert or GPU workers. Autoscale on queue depth.

    Stage 4Global users· Regional ingest buckets

    Upload to the nearest region. Process locally. Catalog in the home DB. CDN global.

    Cost Breakdown

    Development Cost

    $8,000 – $22,000 (5–12 weeks)

    Infrastructure Cost

    $150 – $2,500/month (egress and transcode are the variables)

    Maintenance Cost

    $1,000 – $3,000/month for codec edge cases and storage lifecycle

    Security Considerations

    Pre-signed URLs scoped to one key and a short TTL
    ClamAV or similar before derivatives are public
    Private buckets; CDN uses signed URLs
    No executable content served from the media domain

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    Aurora Global, regional failover, and reads close to the user

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