The Library Moves to Serverless AWS Technology to Deliver High-Resolution Images Online

Tags: ,
The Illinois Digital Library went live with over 130,000 images in AWS S3 storage this February. The Digital Library uses home-grown dynamic image server software to drive a feature-rich web interface for viewing and manipulating these images. This underlying technology has recently been migrated to AWS’s ECS Fargate serverless platform, which enables the Library to provide strong and scalable performance while minimizing compute and storage costs. This presentation will begin with a brief background on web image delivery techniques, and then discuss our situation at the Library before and after the transition to AWS. The bulk of the presentation will be a technical description of how we are using Fargate to serve a large collection of high-resolution images, with the goal of providing a ‘template’ for other AWS serverless projects.