This is an old post and it suffers from some shiny rhetoric, but it was very technically relevant for work I did recently. I had a similar problem as the OP: m

This is an old post and it suffers from some shiny rhetoric, but it was very technically relevant for work I did recently. I had a similar problem as the OP: millions of images stored on S3 that each needed to be rescaled to a set of four new dimensions. Etsy's work encouraged me to dive in with the hope that I could accomplish my task with relatively little pain. Indeed, I was able to write some multi-threaded Python that ran on a single XXL EC2 instance and was able to rip through every image in less than 48 hours. Thanks to Mike, and the folks at Etsy, for posting about your experiences!