Overview
Developed as part of a four-person team, Aussie EcoLens is a multi-cloud wildlife observation platform that allows authenticated users to upload images and videos, automatically identify wildlife species, search media by tags, manage metadata and subscribe to species-based notifications.
The application uses AWS Cognito for registration, email verification and token-based authentication. Protected REST endpoints are exposed through Amazon API Gateway and implemented using AWS Lambda. Uploaded media is stored in Amazon S3, while metadata—including detected species, manually assigned tags, ownership and media URLs—is stored in DynamoDB. Machine-learning inference is hosted through Amazon SageMaker, allowing the model to be updated independently from the serverless application code.
The platform supports checksum-based upload deduplication, thumbnail generation, image and video processing, automated species tagging, compound tag queries, manual bulk tag updates and file deletion. A React frontend hosted on Azure provides user-facing gallery, library, upload, search, tag-management and subscription interfaces. The assignment required the system to combine serverless compute, storage, databases and REST APIs across multiple cloud providers.
My primary contribution was authentication, authorisation, cloud security and AWS–GCP integration. I configured the AWS Cognito Hosted UI and API Gateway authorisers, ensuring that unauthenticated requests to protected endpoints were rejected.
I also designed and implemented the notification subsystem using FastAPI on Google Cloud Run and Firestore. Users could subscribe to selected wildlife tags and receive digest-style email notifications when matching media was uploaded. Secure calls from AWS Lambda to private Cloud Run services were implemented using Workload Identity Federation, avoiding long-lived GCP credentials or shared secrets. I also performed integration and edge-case testing across uploads, duplicate detection, input validation and tag-management workflows.
My role
Cloud Security and Multi-Cloud Integration Developer — responsible for AWS Cognito authentication, API authorisation, the GCP notification subsystem, AWS–GCP Workload Identity Federation, integration