Serverless Video Processing with AWS Lambda and FFmpeg
Traditional video transcoding requires dedicated, expensive servers. We migrated to a serverless architecture using AWS Lambda, reducing our idle costs to zero while allowing massive simultaneous processing.
Table of contents:
The Lambda Layer
Bundling FFmpeg into an AWS Lambda Layer allows multiple functions to share the binary without bloating their deployment packages. We compile FFmpeg statically for Amazon Linux 2.
Event-Driven Architecture
When a user uploads a video to S3, an event triggers our Lambda function. It streams the input from S3, processes it through FFmpeg using pipes, and streams the output back to S3.
Handling Timeouts
Lambda has a 15-minute execution limit. For long videos, we split the video into smaller chunks, process them in parallel across hundreds of Lambda instances, and concatenate the results.