Serverless PDF to DOCX Converter using AWS ECS Fargate

A cloud-native solution for converting PDF files to DOCX format using serverless AWS services and ECS Fargate.

Project Overview

This project demonstrates a scalable PDF conversion pipeline using:

• Amazon S3 for file storage
• Amazon SQS for message queuing
• AWS Lambda for event-driven triggers
• ECS Fargate for containerized processing
• VPC with isolated networking

Key Features

• 🚀 Fully Serverless Architecture
• 🔄 Event-driven processing via S3 triggers
• 📦 Containerized conversion logic in ECS Fargate
• ⚡ Auto-scaling infrastructure
• 🔒 Secure VPC configuration with private subnets
• 📊 CloudWatch monitoring for logs and metrics

Architecture

graph TD
    A[User] -->|Upload PDF| B[(Amazon S3)]
    
    subgraph AWS["AWS Cloud"]
        subgraph VPC["VPC (10.0.0.0/16)"]
            subgraph PublicSubnet["Public Subnet"]
                I[Internet Gateway]
            end
            
            subgraph PrivateSubnet1["Private Subnet (ECS & Lambda)"]
                H[AWS Lambda]
                D[ECS Fargate Tasks]
                E[VPC Endpoints]
            end
        end
        
        B -->|Event Notification| C{Amazon SQS}
        C -->|Triggers| H
        H -->|Invokes| D
        D -->|Pull PDF| B
        D -->|Store DOCX| B
        D -->|Logs| G[Amazon CloudWatch]
        H -->|Logs| G
    end

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Workflow

1. User uploads PDF to S3 bucket
2. S3 event notification sends message to SQS queue
3. Lambda function triggered by SQS messages
4. ECS Fargate task processes PDF conversion
5. Converted DOCX file stored back in S3
6. All logs streamed to CloudWatch

Prerequisites

• AWS Account with appropriate permissions
• AWS CLI v2 installed and configured
• Terraform (for infrastructure deployment)
• Docker (for container image creation)

Deployment Steps

1. Clone repository:

   git clone https://github.com/your-repo/pdf-to-docx-converter.git
   cd pdf-to-docx-converter

2. Build Docker image:

   docker build -t pdf-converter .

3. Terraform initialization:

   cd infrastructure
   terraform init

4. Deploy infrastructure:

   terraform apply -auto-approve

5. Upload test PDF to the created S3 bucket

Configuration

Component	Environment Variables
ECS Task	S3_BUCKET, QUEUE_URL
Lambda Function	ECS_CLUSTER, TASK_DEFINITION

Monitoring

All services send logs to CloudWatch:

• Conversion metrics under /aws/ecs/pdf-conversion
• Lambda invocation logs at /aws/lambda/pdf-trigger
• S3 access logs in s3-access-logs

Cleanup

To remove all resources:

terraform destroy -auto-approve