Welcome to the world's simplest URL Shortening service! Built on AWS using Serverless services, this product takes any URL and returns a shortened URL, which simply forwards to the original input URL. This product works similar to tiny.url and bit.ly but is completely open source!
If you google search "Systems Design Interview URL Shortening" and read some of the links, you will see some rock-solid yet kind of complicated system designs. The idea behind this project was to make an architecture for a URL shortening service using the least amount of services and complexity as possible.
Basically, a user provides a long URL to the S3 website, which in turn calls a Lambda function. The Lambda function simply creates an empty S3 Object, named with a random 5 character string, with nothing but a Metadata header for x-amz-website-redirect-location with the long URL. The shortened link is then provided for the user to test.
A more accurate AWS architecture diagram is as follows:
Please feel free to reach out directly via a Pull Request or contact me via a DM: @paulmarsicloud
There are many shortcomings of this URL Shortener - namely HTTPS. However, I have put together a Roadmap as this is where we'll keep track of upcoming changes on the horizon!