Send Files to EC2 from S3 - AWS

Question

I have a mp4 file in my S3 bucket root. I just need to send that file to the "Downloads" tab in the EC2 Windows instance that I have and I need to do this by Lambda (Python).

Could you please tell me how to do this? Thanks in Advance.

Answer 1

An Amazon EC2 instance is a computer just like any other computer -- it runs Windows or Linux just like normal.

So, ask yourself "How would I copy a file to a Windows/Linux computer"?

By default, computers don't get 'sent' files. You would need to interface with some software running on the Operating System, such as a web server, FTP server, or a shared drive across the network.

If it is a Linux system, you could find a Python library that does SCP (eg Paramiko, see: How to scp in Python? ) and somehow call that from Lambda.

However, the better way is not to send the file to the EC2 instance. Instead, have the EC2 instance retrieve the object from S3. A common method is to have S3 send a message to an Amazon SQS queue that a program on the EC2 instance monitors, and then the program can download the object. This is a much more 'secure' way to transfer the file, since the EC2 instance does not need to be open for inbound connections.