Cloud Gallery

An sample application (scalable and cloud-ready) for image gallery API built with modern backend architecture principles, asynchronous processing, and deep integration with AWS-like services.

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About the Project

This project aims to be a reference about how you can start an API application that will use cloud resources and leverage its capacities by using the following approaches:

• 🔐 Secure user authentication
• 📤 Direct-to-S3 uploads using pre-signed URLs
• 🔎 Advanced search capabilities
• ⚡ Asynchronous thumbnail processing via queues
• 🧠 Search indexing with OpenSearch
• 🐳 Fully containerized infrastructure

The architecture follows clean separation of concerns and Laravel best practices, emphasizing scalability, maintainability, and performance.

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How To Use

Install the Localstack AWS CLI

pip install awscli-local

After the repo is cloned in your machine, just run to install and start the project:

.docker/bin/install && .docker/bin/start

When the containers are already created, just run the starter command:

.docker/bin/start

Then you need to access the laravel app container, seed the development data and start queue worker to get background processing working:

.docker/bin/bash

make reset-data && ./artisan queue:work

You will be able to access the frontend on http://localhost:5173

Technologies Used

Backend

• PHP 8+
• Laravel Framework
• Laravel Scout (OpenSearch integration)
• AWS S3 (or LocalStack for local development)
• Queue Workers
• PHPUnit
• Docker Compose

See more

Cloud Provider - Localstack(Simulated AWS)

• Nginx
• LocalStack (AWS simulation)
• Docker Compose

See more

Frontend

• Vite
• React
• Tailwind CSS
• Axios HTTP Client
• Docker Compose

See more

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Key architectural decisions:

• Direct file upload to S3 to reduce backend load
• Background processing for thumbnails
• Indexed search layer for performance
• API Resources for consistent responses
• Form Requests for input validation

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📎 Technical Highlights

This project demonstrates:

• Cloud-native backend architecture
• Scalable file upload strategy
• Queue-driven asynchronous processing
• Search indexing integration
• Clean layered design
• Fully containerized development environment

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🗺️ Roadmap

Next features and improvements planned for this project:

• 💳 Checkout System: Implementation of a checkout flow to allow users to acquire original high-resolution images.
• 🔄 Infinite Scroll: Enhancement of the image search and gallery view with infinite scroll for a more seamless user experience.
• ☁️ Real AWS Deployment: A comprehensive guide and demonstration on how to deploy this project using real AWS infrastructure, utilizing services like AWS CDK, Amazon ECR, Amazon ECS, and others.