🧠 Building an Event-Driven Facial Analysis App with AWS Rekognition

🔍 Project Overview

Project Name: Event-Driven Facial Analysis
Core Services: S3, Lambda, Rekognition, DynamoDB, IAM
Architecture Style: Event-driven, serverless
Difficulty: Easy/Medium
Cost: Free-tier friendly

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💡 Problem Statement

Facial analysis is being widely used today in areas like:

• Identity verification

• Security & surveillance

• User behavior analytics

Most facial detection tools are either costly or complex to integrate. My goal was to build a simple but scalable cloud-native solution to process user-submitted images in real-time.

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🏗️ Architecture Diagram

Here’s a breakdown of the flow:

1. User uploads a photo to an S3 bucket

2. S3 triggers a Lambda function

3. Lambda calls Amazon Rekognition to analyze the face

4. Extracted metadata (age, emotions, etc.) is saved in DynamoDB

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🔧 Services Used

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💥 Key Challenges

1. IAM Permissions Hell 😵

   • Rekognition couldn’t read the S3 object: Fixed by allowing s3:GetObject to Rekognition

   • Lambda couldn’t write to DynamoDB: Solved using a custom inline policy

2. Understanding Event Payloads

   • Learning how the S3 event JSON is structured was crucial for parsing image names

3. Dealing with S3 Key Encoding

   • Filenames with spaces caused issues → replaced + with space or used urllib.parse.unquote

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✅ Final Result

• Upload an image to S3, and boom 💥

• Face metadata (like AgeRange, Emotions, EyesOpen) appears in DynamoDB instantly!

• All 100% serverless with minimal cost and maximum scalability.

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📂 GitHub Repository

🔗 Event-Driven Facial Analysis on GitHub

Feel free to clone it, improve it, or use it in your own cloud portfolio!

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🔥 Lessons Learned

• IAM is tricky but mastering it is non-negotiable

• Rekognition is insanely powerful and simple to use

• Serverless event-driven apps are a game-changer for real-time use cases

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🚀 What’s Next?

I'm building a complete AWS Projects Portfolio — real-world apps using real AWS services — not just "hello world" stuff.
Next stop: AI Customer Service Bot using Bedrock/SageMaker!

Follow my journey at 👉 abdulraheem.hashnode.dev
Or connect on GitHub 👉 github.com/abdulraheem381

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💬 Have Questions?

Let me know in the comments
Happy building, and see you in the cloud ☁️

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