And with Lambda based on S3 events, you can run stuff automatically on that as well. However, if you want your uploaders to get feedback on their uploads immediately and/or synchronously, you need to upload to app servers.
I'd like to be able to have users upload directly to S3 (obviously less infrastructure and code to maintain) but without being able to provide immediate feedback on the upload I've found it to be preferable to have our own application servers in the upload path. This lets us immediately detect unsupported formats and act on the completion of the upload (whether successful or failure) without delay.
