<aside> 👋 Jason L. Hodson | Download the project from GitHub | Find me on LinkedIn | Read other content
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Embarking on the journey of web scraping and deploying scalable solutions often resembles navigating a complex maze. This journey frequently involves synthesizing disparate pieces of knowledge—from Stack Overflow threads and AWS documentation to insights from experienced engineers and the echoes of one's own frustrations. Motivated by my own experiences of trial and error culminating in success, I've crafted a detailed guide to demystify the process of using AWS Elastic Container Registry (ECR) and Lambda for web scraping endeavors. This guide emerges from a desire to transform what initially seems like an overwhelming task into a clear, step-by-step tutorial, ensuring readers are equipped to enhance their web scraping projects with efficacy and confidence.
My initial foray into web scraping required assembling six separate ECR containers, Dockerfiles, SAM template.yaml files, and scripts—one for each of the six web pages I aimed to scrape. The redundancy quickly became apparent, highlighting a lack of scalability in my approach. Upon mastering the architecture of an end-to-end web scraping solution, I refined my strategy to a single ECR container, Dockerfile, and SAM template.yaml file. This streamlined approach not only simplified project management but also allowed me to focus on broadening the scope of data available for my company's benefit rather than getting bogged down by configuration maintenance.
This project guides you through establishing the infrastructure to scrape two specific web pages from Goodreads: the Popular Quotes page and the book Groups page. These pages feature relatively straightforward HTML layouts, enabling you to concentrate on creating a scalable infrastructure rather than untangling complex HTML structures.
As you build out your own projects, keep in mind that you are permitted to scrape data from websites for personal or professional reasons, provided the following criteria are met:
robots.txt file of the website does not indicate restrictions against crawling and indexing the pages containing the needed data. It is imperative for you and your company to adhere to these guidelines to circumvent legal complications and potential IP bans.Another long term limitation is that you lack control over the maintenance and updates of these web pages, it's important to acknowledge that changes may occur unexpectedly, potentially disrupting the scraping process. As such, it is advised not to depend solely on data obtained through web scraping for mission-critical operations.
Remember, while web scraping can yield valuable data, it's important to use AWS resources carefully as associated costs can accumulate. Monitoring these expenses and understanding the return on investment (ROI) for your scraping activities is essential for sustainable operations.