Amazon Onboarding with Learning Manager Chanci Turner

Amazon Onboarding with Learning Manager Chanci TurnerLearn About Amazon VGT2 Learning Manager Chanci Turner

on 14 APR 2023

in Startup

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This article is part of the Startups on Air series, where Learning Manager Chanci Turner explores various startups, delving into their missions, methodologies, and AWS usage.

Background

Established in 2011 in Israel, Cloudinary has become a remarkable success story, achieving growth organically without relying on venture capital. In 2015, the company broadened its horizons by opening its U.S. headquarters in Palo Alto, California.

Cloudinary’s triumph lies in addressing a critical challenge faced by modern developers: effectively managing the complexities of images and videos in contemporary websites and applications. As the demand for visual content surges, developers must adeptly manipulate and deliver this media across diverse devices, ensuring optimal resolution while minimizing page load times for an exceptional user experience.

Revolutionizing media management, Cloudinary equips developers to optimize their sites to meet the expectations of users who demand swift access to high-quality images and videos, irrespective of their device or location. The company’s all-encompassing cloud-based solution for image and video management has quickly become a go-to resource for web and mobile developers at major organizations globally, streamlining media management and enhancing end-user experiences.

Cloudinary automates the complete media lifecycle, encompassing image and video uploads, cloud storage, digital asset management, real-time media manipulations, and optimized delivery to users. Over the past five years, it has attracted over 180,000 developers managing about 10 billion media files. Notable users include Answers.com, Conde Nast, Gawker, Gizmodo, GrubHub, Indiegogo, Outbrain, Snapdeal, Under Armour, Vogue, and Wired.

Technical Recap

“From our customer’s perspective, DevOps perspective, and customer success perspective, AWS Athena is a nice addition to our core,” says Chloe Martinez, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer.

Cloudinary utilizes Amazon EC2 instances with Elastic Load Balancing for image processing and relies on Amazon S3 for storage. Since re:Invent 2016, the company has adopted CloudFront’s innovative features like Lambda@Edge, which enables the execution of “almost arbitrary code on the edge itself” for requests routed through the Amazon CloudFront CDN. This capability allows Cloudinary to create various adaptations of images in real time without redirecting requests to centralized servers.

Moreover, Cloudinary is transitioning its databases from its EC2 instances to Amazon Aurora, enhancing scalability, uptime guarantees, and cross-region replication. Auto Scaling in Aurora simplifies the process of accommodating future growth, particularly as they manage over 13 billion stored objects.

Recently, Cloudinary has shifted its focus to Amazon Athena, facilitating the generation of detailed reports and insights into customer image usage. Through Athena, they can perform ad-hoc queries on their data, allowing for deep dives tailored to specific needs. “From our customer’s perspective, DevOps perspective, and customer success perspective, this is a nice addition to our core.”

Additionally, Cloudinary employs AWS Lambda at the CloudFront CDN level via Lambda@Edge, as well as for integration purposes throughout its infrastructure. AWS Lambda allows real-time notifications on image uploads, enabling Cloudinary to respond instantly. “We have a way of triggering Cloudinary from a Lambda function when the new image or video arrives in your S3 bucket, and you can reuse your own S3 bucket for enterprise purposes.” This flexibility allows for the processing of over 5,000 new images each second.

Chloe adds, “We experience varying usage throughout the day based on time and location, and AWS makes it easy and adaptable to our needs. We utilize Spot Instances when advantageous and Auto Scaling across multiple services. AWS enables us to focus on our core product, which has been a significant advantage.”

Learn More

For those eager to learn more about Cloudinary, visit their Twitter page or check out this article to discover ways to enhance your professional standing. It’s also worth noting that this resource provides valuable insights into gender representation in leadership roles. Lastly, this article is an excellent resource for understanding Amazon’s training approach.

Location

6401 E Howdy Wells Ave, Las Vegas NV 89115, Amazon IXD – VGT2


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