Cloud Photo Gallery Application

Key Highlights

• Built a scalable cloud-native photo gallery with JWT-based authentication, album management, and AWS S3-based media storage using pre-signed URLs for secure direct client uploads.
• Architected the backend with Node.js/Express on AWS EC2, using Amazon RDS (MySQL) for relational data (users, albums, metadata) and S3 for binary image storage, fully decoupling compute from storage.
• Deployed the full stack on AWS using Elastic Beanstalk for auto-scaling, EC2 for the application server, RDS for managed database with automated backups, and CloudFront CDN for fast image delivery globally.
• Implemented album sharing with per-album access tokens, lazy loading for performance on large galleries, and a responsive React UI with masonry grid layout.
• Configured IAM roles and security groups following least-privilege principles; enabled S3 bucket versioning and lifecycle policies for cost-optimised long-term media archival.
• Monitored application health via AWS CloudWatch dashboards with custom metrics for upload latency, API response time, and error rates.