Skip to main content
This example illustrates a few capabilities of Beam:

​
Customize the runtime

First, you’ll define a Runtime with an Image. We’re going to be defining two things:
  • Which packages to install in the runtime
  • A storage volume to temporarily store images downloaded from S3
app.py
from beam import App, Runtime, Image, Volume

app = App(
    name="s3-background-remover",
    runtime=Runtime(
        cpu=1,
        memory="16Gi",
        image=Image(
            python_version="python3.8",
            python_packages=["pillow", "rembg", "boto3"],
        ),
    ),
    volumes=[Volume(path="./unprocessed_images", name="unprocessed_images")],
)

​
Storing AWS secrets

Since we’re pulling image files from Amazon S3, you’ll need your own AWS credentials to run this example. You can save your AWS credentials in the Beam Secrets Manager, and access the secrets as os.environ variables. 
os.environ["AWS_ACCESS_KEY"]
os.environ["AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY"]

​
Reading and writing files from S3

Let’s write a basic client to read and write files to an S3 bucket. You’ll setup a dedicated bucket for images that are unprocessed, and another bucket for finished images.
run.py
import os
import boto3


class Boto3Client:
    def __init__(self):
        self.boto3_client = boto3.session.Session(
            aws_access_key_id=os.environ["AWS_ACCESS_KEY"],
            aws_secret_access_key=os.environ["AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY"],
            region_name="us-east-1",
        )

    def download_from_s3(self, bucket_name, download_path):
        s3_client = self.boto3_client.resource("s3").Bucket(bucket_name)

        for s3_object in s3_client.objects.all():
            filename = os.path.split(s3_object.key)
            s3_client.download_file(s3_object.key, f"{download_path}/{filename}")

    def upload_to_s3(self, bucket_name, file_body, key):
        s3_client = self.boto3_client.resource("s3").Bucket(bucket_name)
        s3_client.put_object(Body=file_body, Key=key)

​
Processing images with rembg

We’ll use rembg to remove the backgrounds from our images. Let’s write a function to:
  • Download all the files in your bucket to a Storage Volume
  • Apply the background removal process to each image with rembg
  • Upload the each processed image to an S3 bucket
run.py
import os
import io
import boto3
from PIL import Image
from rembg import remove


def process_images():
    client = Boto3Client()
    # Download S3 files to a storage volume
    client.download_from_s3(
        bucket_name=os.environ["UNPROCESSED_IMAGES_BUCKET"],
        download_path="./unprocessed_images",
    )

    for f in os.listdir("./unprocessed_images"):
        with open(f"./unprocessed_images/{f}", "rb") as file:
            img = Image.open(file)
            output = remove(img)
            name = os.path.splitext(f)[0]

            # Convert image to bytes
            img_in_bytes = io.BytesIO()
            output.save(img_in_bytes, format="PNG")

            # Write back to S3 bucket
            client.upload_to_s3(
                bucket_name=os.environ["PROCESSED_IMAGES_BUCKET"],
                file_body=img_in_bytes.getvalue(),
                key=f"{name}.png",
            )

​
Running the function on a schedule

Since we want this to run on a schedule, we’ll add a Scheduled Job to the Beam app.
app.py
@app.schedule(when="every 5m")

​
Deploying the app

To deploy the app, enter your shell from the working directory and run: 
beam deploy app.py
After you run this command, your app will run every hour, indefinitely. You can modify the frequency by updating the cron interval and redeploying the app. And if you decide that you’d rather invoke this manually as a REST API, you can do that too.
⌘I