Serverless licorice - An Amazon Lambda photo gallery

Monday. November 14, 2016 - 1 min

Licorice - Part One - the Release note

1. the pitch

As an avid photographer, I have a rather spontaneous tendency to share my photos with relatives so they will get some idea of the what/when/where of my whereabouts; eventually satisfying their thirst for possible destination in their upcoming vacation.

I wanted to use something already existing, yet, in most cases, the price to pay for that freedom is usually hurting on many levels:

1. the real cost of the service (maintenance, downtime, availability, etc.)
2. the actual limitations of the service, including API documentation.
3. the open-ness of the service

Given these few, yet impacting variables, I decided to make my own. I started this project eating rotella. So there it was: licorice.

One last yet considerably important point: licorice should cost as little as possible to run. My target is to be able to run licorice for a year out of the Free Tier of my personal AWS account (excluding the domain name price) and to be installable in a few clicks through AWS CloudFormation.

2. what’s it using ?

All of licorice relies on the following technologies and services:

licorice — AWS CloudFormation

licorice-lambda-node: — AWS Lambda (NodeJs + async/aws-sdk/gm/crypto) Amazon DynamoDB Amazon Simple Storage Service (s3)

licorice-web-template — Amazon CloudFront Amazon Route 53 AWS Identity & Access Management Roles Amazon Cognito

and works very well with Adobe Lightroom, which i use both on pc and mac.

Actually, this is not my first attempt to work with Lightroom and the cloud: lightroom sync with s3 windows/macos

UPDATE Dec 19th 2016: licorice is showing up now, bits and pieces to come.
UPDATE Apr 6th 2017: licorice v1 is live.

Nicolas David

Entrepreneur, Autodidact, OpenSource enthusiast, Amateur photographer & Food aficionado.