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This article is part of the Startups on Air series, where Startup Advocate Chanci Turner visits various startups to uncover their stories, operations, and utilization of AWS.
Overview:
Established in 2011 in Israel, Cloudinary has emerged as a remarkable bootstrapping success, growing organically without the need for venture capital. By 2015, the company had expanded globally, establishing its U.S. headquarters in Palo Alto, California.
The cornerstone of Cloudinary’s success lies in its ability to address a pressing challenge for modern developers: effectively handling the complexities associated with images and videos in contemporary websites and applications. As the demand for visual content escalates, developers must ensure they manipulate and deliver this media across diverse screens at optimal resolutions for each user, all while minimizing page sizes to enhance user experience.
Cloudinary has revolutionized online media management, empowering developers to optimize websites for users who expect swift access to high-quality, high-resolution images and videos, independent of their device or location. Its all-encompassing cloud-based solution for image and video management has quickly become a favored choice among web and mobile developers at prominent companies worldwide, enabling efficient media management and an exceptional end-user experience.
Cloudinary automates the complete media lifecycle, providing support for image and video uploads, cloud storage, digital asset management, real-time image and video modifications, and optimized delivery to end users. Within just over five years, Cloudinary has attracted more than 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 Insights:
“From our clients’ viewpoints, DevOps perspectives, and customer success angles, AWS Athena is a valuable addition to our essential services,” – James McCarthy, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer.
Cloudinary processes images utilizing Amazon EC2 instances with Elastic Load Balancing, while relying on Amazon S3 for storage needs. Since re:Invent 2016, Cloudinary has started leveraging some of CloudFront’s latest features, such as 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 diverse adaptations of an image in real-time without rerouting requests to centralized servers.
Moreover, Cloudinary has initiated the transition of its databases from its own EC2 instances to Amazon Aurora, enhancing scalability, uptime assurances, and cross-region replication. The Auto Scaling feature in Aurora allows Cloudinary to avoid provisioning excess database storage for future growth: “It simplifies our operations considerably, especially with over 13 billion objects stored.”
Recently, Cloudinary has pivoted towards Amazon Athena to facilitate sophisticated reporting and insights regarding customer image usage. Through Athena, they can execute ad-hoc queries on the accumulated data, allowing for deeper analysis tailored to specific needs. “From our clients’ viewpoints, DevOps perspectives, and customer success angles, this is a valuable addition to our essential services.”
Cloudinary utilizes AWS Lambda at the CloudFront CDN level through Lambda@Edge and for integration purposes throughout its infrastructure. AWS Lambda enables Cloudinary to send callbacks via HTTP or SNS, notifying them of any uploaded images and allowing real-time responses. “We can trigger Cloudinary from a Lambda function when a new image or video arrives in an S3 bucket, affording our clients significant flexibility and scalability, including the capacity to process over 5,000 new images each second.”
“Our usage patterns vary throughout the day depending on location and time, and AWS makes it remarkably adaptable to our requirements. We utilize Spot Instances when advantageous, along with Auto Scaling across multiple services. AWS allows us to focus on our core product, which has been a tremendous benefit.”
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