PDF Alchemy is an interesting new service that I've helped to build. It's a PDF conversion service aimed at developers - that is, it's entirely API based, and not intended for end users. But what makes PDF Alchemy interesting to me, is the way it uses a number of Amazon's cloud services.

To start with, the PDF conversion servers themselves run on Amazon EC2. EC2 is an excellent match here, since it allows PDF Alchemy to easily, and rapidly, scale to handle almost any possible volume, but also to then scale back again during off-peak periods.

When creating HTTP web forms to allow browser-based uploads to S3 bucket, you need to create and sign upload policies. Now if that statement lost you, then you should read over either of the following introductions to browser-based uploads to S3:

1. Amazon Simple Storage Service: Browser-Based Uploads using POST Proposal (I'll be referring to this one a few times throughout this post)
2. Browser Uploads to S3 using HTML POST Forms

As mentioned back in this post, I helped to build Job Bounty Hunter. So, I was quite pleased to see one of my own architecture diagrams appear on this Amazon Web Services blog post.

So, since that particular diagram is now publicly available, I might as well present it here - I did create it, after all ;)