Best AWS Storage Option for Exporting Directories as .zip Files?

Question

I'm brand new to AWS products, ruby on rails, web development, and coding of any type. For my first project after a quick (and dirty) bootcamp, I'm trying to build a ruby-on-rails website that stores images and allows the user to download them as a zip file. I used the RubyZip gem to accomplish this in my EC2 dev environment, but I have deployed to Elastic Beanstalk with S3 file storage, and the RubyZip gem seems unable to handle this structure without traditional directory targets for zipping.

My question is what's the best setup to achieve this functionality in EB? Disregarding the ruby constraint, zipping an S3 directory seems tricky. Should I move to EFS or another storage system? I plan to erase the folders regularly, and limit them to ~100 photos, so long term and large size storage are not a concern. Thanks very much!

Edit: I am attached to Ruby (only language I know), but not RubyZip, AWS, or much of anything else if they are not the best approach for this task.

Answer 1

I think you're on the right path as far as using S3 as a solution. The problem that your facing is that when you're interacting with S3 it's not like a folder on your local system, instead you're hitting the S3 API to interact with the files. (upload, edit, delete ect). This will be a problem you'll encounter with every AWS based storage solution.

I think the solution, in your case, is to fetch all of the photos and download them to a temporary folder on your local system. Then, you could zip them using Ruby, locally. After it's zipped, upload it back to S3.

Edit: By locally I mean onto the server where the Ruby application is running (not client-side)