Daily is an open-source browser-extension that delivers curated software development-related news (dev news for short) to your new tab. Around the clock, we gather and rank articles from 200-plus unique sources, keeping developers in the loop with relevant news in their field. All told, we serve content to over 35,000 developers worldwide.
The Challenge of Image Management
Images are an essential part of the Daily news feed but their large footprint tends to impede delivery speed. That was a challenge we had to grapple with from Day One.
Before Cloudinary, we hosted our images on Google Storage buckets, delivering the media through a content delivery network (CDN), but had to manually transform and optimize them all by ourselves. The many tasks involved—such as scaling the images to the proper size, keeping them in both WebP and JPEG formats (or PNG for transparent images), and responsively delivering the right format, depending on the browser—were beyond tedious and cumbersome. Every minute we spent on beating the images into shape is a minute we couldn’t spend on enhancing our offering. The problem became an ongoing challenge, so much so that we decided to cast around for solutions. Cloudinary was the perfect answer.
Cloudinary to the Rescue
Right off the bat, it was easy and fast to get Cloudinary working. It took us less than a man-day to change our pipeline to upload images to Cloudinary. We then spent some time to become familiar with the optimizations that we can apply along with the steps involved, which, gratifyingly, were a cakewalk. Altogether, it took us only a few days to learn the ropes with trial and error. That was no time sink at all for the tremendous capabilities we netted from using Cloudinary.
We’ve been managing media with Cloudinary for over a year now and totally love it. No matter that our product is media-intensive, e.g., we processed through Cloudinary 23.4 million requests last month, a whopping 320 GB of media data, we can always count on a seamless and problem-free delivery.
The One Feature That Stands Out
Cloudinary’s on-the-fly transformation feature for images is simply outstanding, bar none. It’s an astronomical time-saver, eliminating the need for migrations or momentous decisions ahead of delivery.
What can be simpler than specifying your transformation criteria with a URL parameter? You want to optimize media to make them load fast on small-screen devices with a sharp display? No worries, just scale the images with Cloudinary on the fly. To avoid overage and billing surprises, you can enable Cloudinary’s Strict Transformations feature, which prevents application of dynamic transformations other than those you specified.
An Indispensable Tool for Business Growth
With Cloudinary, image delivery just works—and works well and efficiently. We can now transform media on the fly or ahead of time, ensuring a smooth and fast process for our app and accelerating loading speed. As a small team, we count every second and must be vigilant about how we spend our time. Thanks to Cloudinary, image delivery is now off our worry list, affording us more time to focus on core issues and deliver more value to our users. When our users are happy, we are happy.
We look forward to continuing to leverage the robust capabilities of the Cloudinary platform in the years ahead.
