Hello World!
By: Ronen Burin
We’re finally here on Medium! It’s terrific here. Great people, great platform.
You might wonder, “Why is Cloudinary on Medium when it has its own blog?”
The answer is simple. We at Cloudinary desire a community space in which to give you a behind-the-scenes look at the work of our engineering, design, and product teams; also to discuss our challenges and achievements in building a heavy-duty image and video platform. Above all, we’d like to engage with our readers. Feel free to ask us questions, comment on our posts, and share with us your experiences. Tell us what resonates with you and what doesn’t by highlighting the sections in question and explaining to us why.
The fact is, Cloudinary is probably one of the best-kept secrets in the media-management industry. You probably didn’t know that the company generates and oversees billions of new images and videos a day, did you?
At its core, Cloudinary is a cloud service: the de facto image- and video-management solution that furnishes developers with building blocks for managing media assets — from uploading through storage to sophisticated, dynamic manipulations and smart and efficient delivery. We also provide an advanced and innovative digital asset management (DAM) system for marketers, graphic designers, and content professionals. Our solutions comprise deep analysis and management of media, optimization of file size and quality, adaptation of images to various devices and graphic designs, and fast, reliable delivery of images and video to users worldwide.
Today, hundred of thousands of developers around the world use Cloudinary products. We also serve thousands of paying customers, from startups to global brands.
From Day One on, Cloudinary has been a bootstrapped company, meaning that we do not take on funding for operations and growth. Thanks to that approach, our marketing budget in the early days of the company was minimal, which lead us to focus on creating detailed documentation, tutorials, and technical blog posts. Another side effect was small but effective teams.
The engineering team at Cloudinary is small, very small. However, its members are technological leaders, the best I have met, with many years of technical and diverse experiences that have enabled the development of outstanding software with exceptional, intuitive architectures.
Under the hood of Cloudinary, you’ll find many gems:
- An architecture that supports an amazing volume of images and videos, with millions added daily. When necessary, the system automatically scales to manage them all.
- Advanced processing of images and videos along with in-depth analyses.
- Deep learning for comprehensive identification of objects, labels, and transformations.
- A big-data pipeline that houses our development projects and constant enhancements, delivering only the best solutions to our customers.
- Dynamic collaborations with the world’s leading content delivery networks (CDNs), expanding their services and taking them to whole new levels.
- High-availability and disaster-recovery capabilities backed up by a first-rate architecture that ensures no service disruptions.
- A cutting-edge management and editing system, encompassing such features as advanced search; tagging; and management of metadata, access privileges, lifecycles, and reports on errors and usage.
- Seamlessly-embedded UI widgets in client sites.
- SDKs in a variety of technologies that make all the above capabilities available to you in your favorite technology and environment.
And that’s only a partial list.
Why am I recounting those impressive items to you? Because we Cloudinary engineers do amazing things and don’t want to keep all those goodies to ourselves. Instead, we want to share our knowledge with you: from research to decisions to architecture to development. Even though this blog will focus on engineering and technology, we will, from time to time, talk about team building, our unique culture and processes, and other topics of interest.
Are you interested in joining the Cloudinary team? If so, check out our careers page.
I can’t wait to write the next post. See ya soon!
