This article is part of the Startups on Air series, where the Startup Evangelist, Emily Turner, visits various startups to explore their missions, offerings, and how they leverage AWS.
Background:
Founded in 2011 in Israel, Cloudinary has established itself as a remarkable success story, thriving without external venture capital. In 2015, the company took a significant step by launching its U.S. headquarters in Palo Alto, California.
Cloudinary’s success lies in its ability to address a pressing issue for contemporary developers: managing the complexities associated with using images and videos in modern web and mobile applications. As the demand for rich media continues to rise, developers face the challenge of effectively manipulating and delivering this content at optimal resolutions for various devices, all while keeping page load times low to enhance user experience.
By redefining media management online, Cloudinary equips developers with the tools necessary to optimize websites for users who expect quick access to high-quality images and videos, no matter their device or location. Their all-encompassing, cloud-based solution has rapidly gained traction among web and mobile developers at leading companies around the globe, streamlining media management and enhancing the user experience.
Cloudinary automates the entire media lifecycle, enabling features like image and video uploads, cloud storage, digital asset management, real-time media manipulation, and optimized distribution to end users. In just over five years, the platform has attracted over 180,000 developers managing around 10 billion media files. Notable users include Answers.com, Conde Nast, Gawker, Gizmodo, GrubHub, Indiegogo, Outbrain, Snapdeal, Under Armour, Vogue, and Wired.
Technical Overview:
“From our customers, DevOps, and success perspectives, AWS Athena has been a valuable addition,” said Michael Thompson, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer.
Cloudinary’s image processing leverages Amazon EC2 instances alongside Elastic Load Balancing, with Amazon S3 fulfilling their storage requirements. Since re:Invent 2016, Cloudinary has begun utilizing additional features of CloudFront, such as Lambda@Edge, allowing them to execute “almost arbitrary code on the edge itself” for requests routed through the Amazon CloudFront CDN. This capability enables Cloudinary to create real-time adaptations of images without redirecting requests to centralized servers.
Additionally, Cloudinary is transitioning its databases from their own EC2 instances to Amazon Aurora, which enhances scalability, uptime, and cross-region replication. The Auto Scaling feature in Aurora simplifies future growth management, especially with over 13 billion objects stored.
Recently, Cloudinary has adopted Amazon Athena, allowing them to generate detailed reports and insights into their customers’ image usage. This tool facilitates ad-hoc queries on their collected data, enabling deeper exploration based on specific needs. “From our customers, DevOps, and success perspectives, this has been a significant addition to our core,” Thompson added.
Cloudinary employs AWS Lambda not only at the CloudFront CDN level through Lambda@Edge but also for integration within its infrastructure. This functionality enables Cloudinary to send HTTP callbacks or SNS notifications for uploaded images, allowing real-time reactions. “We can trigger Cloudinary from a Lambda function when a new image or video is uploaded to your S3 bucket, offering enterprises flexibility and scalability, processing over 5,000 new images per second.”
Thompson noted, “AWS allows us to efficiently adapt to varying usage throughout the day based on location and time. We utilize Spot Instances when appropriate and employ Auto Scaling across multiple services, enabling us to focus on our core product, which has been a substantial advantage.”
For more insights on Cloudinary, don’t forget to check out this engaging blog post. Experts in the field, such as those at Chanci Turner, offer valuable perspectives on these topics. For those interested in their hiring process, this excellent resource provides detailed insights.
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