SAEPUL MALIKCloud Infrastructure: S3 Media, Amplify, and the Vercel-to-Amplify Migration
Presigned-URL S3 media upload with a Lambda image optimizer, and hosting migrated from Vercel to AWS Amplify.
Problem
Media was previously handled without a dedicated pipeline for organization or optimization, and all projects were originally hosted on Vercel before a collective decision — driven jointly by the engineering manager and the team — to migrate to Amplify.
Architecture
Media uploads flow two ways: directly from the browser to S3 via presigned URLs, and through a backend-proxied path that runs images through a Lambda-based converter/optimizer before storage. Amplify now handles hosting and deployment for all migrated projects.
Execution
Not solo work — a collective initiative across the team. The hard tradeoff surfaced by the migration: Amplify deploys take 6–10 minutes with manual cache management, noticeably slower than Vercel's automatic caching.
Impact
Media is now organized in S3 rather than stored directly in the database — a cleaner separation that also makes image optimization easier to apply going forward.