Nuxeo Lambda PictureView Conversion

Watch the related courses on Hyland University:

DAM Architecture course.
LTS 2017 new feature with Nuxeo Stream and the Lambda integration (min 3'00)

Functional Overview

The Nuxeo Lambda PictureView Conversion addon enables users to dramatically improve the Nuxeo picture conversions speed by offloading this heavy processing from Nuxeo/WorkManager to AWS Lambda. As a result, the Nuxeo instance performance are highest when uploading thousands of pictures. Behind the scene, AWS Lambda has access to ImageMagick and generate externally picture conversions from assets stored in S3.

Prerequisites

An AWS account with a running Nuxeo instance on Amazon EC2
The Amazon S3 Online Storage addon configured on your instance
The Nuxeo DAM installed on your instance

Installation

This addon requires no specific installation steps. It can be installed like any other package with nuxeoctl command line or from the Marketplace.

Configuration

The configuration is made of two steps:

Creation of the Lambda function
Configuration of Nuxeo to call the Lambda function

Lambda Configuration

Lambda Function Initialization

Connect to AWS and search for the Lambda service
Create a new function with the following properties
- Name: A unique name (test_nuxeoPictureConversion for example)
- Runtime: Node.js 6.10
- Role: You can leave the default value
- Existing role: service-role/lambda-role

Your Lambda function should be initialized:

Lambda Function Import

Open your command line editor

Clone the nuxeo-lambda-pictureview-conversion GitHub project by executing:

git clone https://github.com/nuxeo/nuxeo-lambda-pictureview-conversion.git

Go to nuxeo-lambda-pictureview-conversion/aws_lambda_impl folder and generate the package using npm i
Go to the nuxeo_lambda_impl folder and create a .zip file containing all its content
In the AWS Lambda function screen, go to the Function code section. At this point you need to generate a .zip file which stores the lambda function
Upload the .zip file in the Section package field and update the handler name to lambda_function.handler

Lambda Function Tuning

Ensure you have enough memory and your timeout is big enough (in the Basic settings section)
Check also that the timeout duration is reasonable (set to 1 or 3 seconds by default, which doesn't let enough time for picture conversions)

Nuxeo Server Configuration

Nuxeo Server needs to identify which lambda function to call for the picture conversion. This is done by adding the parameter nuxeo.lambda.image.conversion in the Nuxeo server configuration file nuxeo.conf and giving it a value to your function (test_nuxeoPictureConversion in our example).

Monitor the Lambda Function Activity

In order to see how the lambda function is running, click on the Monitoring tab of your AWS Lambda function.

On your Nuxeo server, when you import or create any picture, Nuxeo should convert successfully the different renditions and you should observe a pick of activity on the Invocation count and the Invocation duration diagram: