Cloudinary is an end-to-end solution for managing images and videos, for developers. The CDN and optimization parts are tightly coupled with the digital asset management: e.g. if you change an image, the system knows to invalidate the relevance cached images, and is CDN-agnostic. So no, CDNs are not competition, but rather good partners to Cloudinary.
Regarding the DAM: CMS and Ecom systems are indeed getting better, but media assets you upload to them become siloed in the CMS. Cloudinary acts as a headless DAM that you can embed in any CMS and use as a single source of truth, relieving a lot of the pains of handling media files and their versions.
I would add a image/video hosting & management category - there are some well established players in the market that have nice free tiers (full disclosure: I work at one). Makes life simpler than working with Storage & CDNs.
TLS is still slow, for users on 3G phones, remote areas, and 3rd world countries.
But who cares about them? They're poor! They can cope with a slow web.
with kernel tuning, S3 performance improves (and will probably improve on GC/Azure as well). Also, author uses Ubuntu 14.4 (see https://twitter.com/Zbjorn/status/684492084422688768), which doesn't use AWS "Enhanced networking" by default. Would be interesting to see results for tuned systems.
"1:08 AM PDT We believe we have identified the root cause of the elevated error rates and latencies for requests to the US-STANDARD Region and are working to resolve the issue."
Thanks for sharing this and being on HN to answer - very interesting architecture! How do you deal with customers from remote locations (Asia, Oceania) complaining about slow upload speeds?
And with Lambda based on S3 events, you can run stuff automatically on that as well. However, if you want your uploaders to get feedback on their uploads immediately and/or synchronously, you need to upload to app servers.
It also means that you need to scale your upload servers (IO & long requests), this is more difficult than trusting S3 to scale for you. However having your S3 open to uploads has it's downsides. We at Cloudinary do uploads to our own (autoscaled) instances and only then persist.
