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I have been missing a feature from Alibaba Cloud that AWS does not provide and there seems no easy replacement: Their Object Storage Service (OSS) provides an

I have been missing a feature from Alibaba Cloud that AWS does not provide and there seems no easy replacement: Their Object Storage Service (OSS) provides an endpoint for transforming images (resizing/thumbnailing, compressing etc). Putting it behind a CDN (which is also integrated in the feature), this solves virtually all the image processing requirements ever needed in a common web or mobile application. https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/doc-detail/44687.htm?spm=a3c0i.o44686en.b99.297.7d6dfaf8QjDwzO https://www.alibabacloud.com/help/doc-detail/44687.htm?spm=a...

sadovmychyi 9y ago
App Engine from Google's cloud has such feature -- image transformations and CDN for them with dynamic resizing and some easy transforms from URL parameters.
- sanat 9y ago
  Here's a great blog post on how to use it. https://medium.com/google-cloud/uploading-resizing-and-serving-images-with-google-cloud-platform-ca9631a2c556 https://medium.com/google-cloud/uploading-resizing-and-servi...
KaoruAoiShiho 9y ago
How's the pricing compared to https://www.imgix.com/pricing https://www.imgix.com/pricing or filepicker.io?
- ghayes 9y ago
  I add my support as Imgix being a great service.
- _Codemonkeyism 9y ago
  Imgix is unbelievable. The filters are useful, the support is great but above all the prices are excellent.
  - sitepodmatt 9y ago
    Imgix is okay, support is terrible, and status page can stay green for 15minute when they are down (eg recent fastly issue). We stuck with them when image processing was slow due to capacity which the CEO eventually publically apologised for, but in new projects we will probably avoid them.
    - _Codemonkeyism 9y ago
      With support I've meant the answers I got from technical support and the timing with issues. Yes the 15min made me angry too, as I needed to read about the Fastly fail on HN instead of the Imgix status page. What would you use in your next project?
      - sitepodmatt 9y ago
        We used imgix on last project as a last line of defense against unoptimized images due to the timing constraints of the project. However on greenfield, we would build the image optimization into the build process (could be as simple as few imagemagick commands), and the save pipeline for CMS'ish part (content blocks, adding products etc..) and then just use a dumb CDN. Imgix really annoyed me as they didnt bother replying about the status page fiasco, this is after we gave them a free-pass with their capacity planning which made us look like idiots recommending them (i.e images loading super slow). Not again, bad ethics.
        _Codemonkeyism 9y ago
        Ah been there with the imagemagick in several companies, would never go that way again.
    - corobo 9y ago
      Wait people get annoyed at 15 minutes now? I honestly read your comment as if it was 15 hours at first and agreed but come on, 15 minutes is nothing unless you're paying for a five nines SLA.
ENGNR 9y ago
It's actually not that bad doing it in the browser these days with something like https://github.com/nodeca/pica https://github.com/nodeca/pica Saves upload time for large images at the very least
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- OJFord 9y ago
  Until we get solid middle-out compression, surely the main problem with doing it in the browser was, is, and will continue to be bandwidth?
  - mmosta 9y ago
    This also applies to resizing assists before upload from the client to the endpoint.
dandr01d 9y ago
You could create a Lambda function to create and upload these transforms back to S3/CloudFront. Would definitely be a nice feature to get out of the box though.
kvz 9y ago
Or just use transloadit.com which has been providing that, and other processing features since 2009 :) Disclosure: Transloadit founder
- ToFab123 9y ago
  Why do you not have code samples in c#?
  - kvz 9y ago
    There's a community project in c# but we don't have an official sdk for it as we didn't have the expertise on the team and haven't gotten around to outsourcing this yet. Would you (or anyone reading this) be interested by any chance, and has the credentials (github account with relevant projects) shoot an email to kvz@transloadit.com : )
    - brianwawok 9y ago
      Only people with github projects can code a simple wrapper for you? Those bitbucket heathens.
zxstreak 9y ago
Our website and app are heavily replying on the image servers. https://www.ywart.com https://www.ywart.com
giaour 9y ago
There's no AWS service that does this, but you can set something up using Lambda, API Gateway, and S3. There's an example repo at https://github.com/awslabs/serverless-image-resizing https://github.com/awslabs/serverless-image-resizing
- baybal2 9y ago
  It will be different: Aliyun gives you transcoding/resizing on every CDN endpoint (which they have many) vs resizing in DC
  - BillinghamJ 9y ago
    Could potentially do it with Lambda@Edge
    - sudhirj 9y ago
      If you can resize in under 50ms with less than 128mb RAM usages, maybe. With the current constraints JSON and text transforms are more feasible.
- forgot-my-pw 9y ago
  Alternatively, you can use a 3rd party image engine on AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B019YEIK7M?qid=1500045387561&sr=0-7&ref_=srh_res_product_title https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B019YEIK7M?qid=1500045... It should be a lot faster.
wener 9y ago
Please don't trust any Chinese company will protect your data, because even my company will sale or buy some personal data, we will gather as much data as we can.
- sschueller 9y ago
  How is this limited to China?
- 2pointsomone 9y ago
  Hey that's not cool. How can you just disqualify a company that way just because they are Chinese? Alibaba is an excellent company with a lot of integrity.
  - arihant 9y ago
    I think the trust deficit towards Chinese companies is due to their government. The government can just force their companies to hand over all data. They already do for their own citizens.
    - dirktheman 9y ago
      As opposed to the US...?
      - jjeaff 9y ago
        In the US, there is due process. Granted, that due process has been seriously eroded over the years in cases where the government can claim terrorism, but otherwise, it still takes a court order to force a company to comply with a government request for information.
        zorked 9y ago
        Is due process that has been eroded over the years still due process? Where do we draw the line?
porker 9y ago
There's always http://cloudinary.com/ http://cloudinary.com/
nkkollaw 9y ago
Does it work for GIFs? I've just launched https://www.gifsonic.com https://www.gifsonic.com for resizing animated GIFs, and I'm still trying to figure out how useful it is...
- jhgg 9y ago
  Gif resizing is pretty hard. We've spent some pretty substantial effort in doing gif resizes for our infra. Out of curiosity, what library is your saas backed by?
  - codedokode 9y ago
    Imagemagick can resize gifs.
    - nkkollaw 9y ago
      They look pretty bad, though.
  - nkkollaw 9y ago
    I'm using a mix of FFmpeg, Gifsicle, and Vips depending on the transformation that is being applied. GIFs resized with FFmpeg will look great if everything is set up correctly, but if you need other effects it gets really tricky.
dpix 9y ago
I wrote a blog post about how to set this up on an Elastic Beanstalk instance. As well as uploading images directly to S3 rather than double handling them on your own backend. https://pickledsoftware.co.nz/jekyll/update/2017/02/14/Hosting-images-an-easier-way.html https://pickledsoftware.co.nz/jekyll/update/2017/02/14/Hosti...
wanghq 9y ago
Glad that you find it useful. I'd like to point out that lambda+s3 notification solution is asynchronous, while this OSS feature does transformation synchronously and can be applied to any objects (not just the new ones which could trigger functions), which is pretty awesome. I work for Alibaba Cloud. Drop me an email (in my profile) if you're interested in the opportunities. Yes, we have office in Seattle (Bellevue).
- GordonS 9y ago
  Do you guys take on remote workers ?
  - wanghq 9y ago
    Probably not at this time. There are some openings in Bay area as well: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/alibaba-group-jobs-san-mateo-ca/ https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/alibaba-group-jobs-san-mateo-c...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- jychang 9y ago
  I currently live in Bellevue, not looking for a job right now but where is the Alibaba Cloud office? Downtown? Factoria near T-Mobile? Crossroads near MS campus?
  - gtirloni 9y ago
    https://www.google.com/search?q=alibaba+seattle https://www.google.com/search?q=alibaba+seattle
  - wanghq 9y ago
    It's here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/City+Center+Bellevue/@47.6149813,-122.1979755,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x54906c885197d883:0x22eda30d772c3ba8!8m2!3d47.6149813!4d-122.1957815 https://www.google.com/maps/place/City+Center+Bellevue/@47.6...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
sudhirj 9y ago
For an AWS equivalent, can deploy https://github.com/RealImage/concave https://github.com/RealImage/concave on Lambda+API Gateway in the same region as the source images s3 bucket, and stick a Cloudfront distribution in front of it. Hit me up at sudhir.j@gmail.com if you need help.
- sudhirj 9y ago
  Used in production at http://www.moviebuff.com http://www.moviebuff.com and https://www.justickets.in https://www.justickets.in if you want to see it in action.
grillwork 9y ago
i use cloudinary for these same type of features over AWS. Their libraries and UX isn't always the best but their transformation features are out of this world good.
neya 9y ago
I use a (not so well known) feature with Google AppEngine - Images API. It's pretty awesome as well. Works really well for web applications with basic image manipulation requirements. https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python/images/ https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python/imag... The best part is, you call your image with specific parameters that'll do transformations on the fly. For example, <image url>/image.jpg?s=120 will return a 120px image. Appending -c will give you a cropped version, etc.
- amrit_b 9y ago
  Reminds me of something similar I did with videos couple of years back - http://www.transcode.io/ http://www.transcode.io/
agopaul 9y ago
There are other Saas services for that, like https://www.imgix.com/ https://www.imgix.com/. Not sure if this plays well with S3 out of the box though
- asadjb 9y ago
  I am using Imgix for a personal photography site and it works great with S3. You point it to an S3 bucket, give it the access keys, and then use the URL they provide instead of the S3 bucket URL. Using various query params, you can then control a bunch of transformations to the images that are applied on the fly when requested.
nicozhangw 9y ago
Another company named qiniu offers this feature
baybal2 9y ago
Not only they provide real-time resizing on CDN, but many many many other things: hardware HTTPS acceleration (check their HTTP vs HTTPS latency,) per-file authentication, hardware Gzip, 'bouncer' for websocket connections. They used to provide free load balancing on the edge for APIs, but I can't find that service in the control panel anymore.
jijajoltz 9y ago
try this: http://pageload.io http://pageload.io - proxy that goes between your origin and cdn or users and optimizes content for you. per host pricing.
forgot-my-pw 9y ago
You can use this on AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B019YEIK7M?qid=1500045387561&sr=0-7&ref_=srh_res_product_title https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B019YEIK7M?qid=1500045... It's really fast and can do image resize on the fly. They wrote the engine in C and Assembly. Should be way faster than ImageMagick.
smcnally 9y ago
Automattic's Photon does this, too. https://developer.wordpress.com/docs/photon/api/ https://developer.wordpress.com/docs/photon/api/

sadovmychyi 9y ago

App Engine from Google's cloud has such feature -- image transformations and CDN for them with dynamic resizing and some easy transforms from URL parameters.

sanat 9y ago
Here's a great blog post on how to use it. https://medium.com/google-cloud/uploading-resizing-and-serving-images-with-google-cloud-platform-ca9631a2c556 https://medium.com/google-cloud/uploading-resizing-and-servi...

KaoruAoiShiho 9y ago

How's the pricing compared to https://www.imgix.com/pricing https://www.imgix.com/pricing or filepicker.io?

ghayes 9y ago
I add my support as Imgix being a great service.
_Codemonkeyism 9y ago
Imgix is unbelievable. The filters are useful, the support is great but above all the prices are excellent.
- sitepodmatt 9y ago
  Imgix is okay, support is terrible, and status page can stay green for 15minute when they are down (eg recent fastly issue). We stuck with them when image processing was slow due to capacity which the CEO eventually publically apologised for, but in new projects we will probably avoid them.
  - _Codemonkeyism 9y ago
    With support I've meant the answers I got from technical support and the timing with issues. Yes the 15min made me angry too, as I needed to read about the Fastly fail on HN instead of the Imgix status page. What would you use in your next project?
    - sitepodmatt 9y ago
      We used imgix on last project as a last line of defense against unoptimized images due to the timing constraints of the project. However on greenfield, we would build the image optimization into the build process (could be as simple as few imagemagick commands), and the save pipeline for CMS'ish part (content blocks, adding products etc..) and then just use a dumb CDN. Imgix really annoyed me as they didnt bother replying about the status page fiasco, this is after we gave them a free-pass with their capacity planning which made us look like idiots recommending them (i.e images loading super slow). Not again, bad ethics.
      - _Codemonkeyism 9y ago
        Ah been there with the imagemagick in several companies, would never go that way again.
  - corobo 9y ago
    Wait people get annoyed at 15 minutes now? I honestly read your comment as if it was 15 hours at first and agreed but come on, 15 minutes is nothing unless you're paying for a five nines SLA.

ENGNR 9y ago

It's actually not that bad doing it in the browser these days with something like https://github.com/nodeca/pica https://github.com/nodeca/pica Saves upload time for large images at the very least

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
OJFord 9y ago
Until we get solid middle-out compression, surely the main problem with doing it in the browser was, is, and will continue to be bandwidth?
- mmosta 9y ago
  This also applies to resizing assists before upload from the client to the endpoint.

dandr01d 9y ago

You could create a Lambda function to create and upload these transforms back to S3/CloudFront. Would definitely be a nice feature to get out of the box though.

kvz 9y ago

Or just use transloadit.com which has been providing that, and other processing features since 2009 :) Disclosure: Transloadit founder

ToFab123 9y ago
Why do you not have code samples in c#?
- kvz 9y ago
  There's a community project in c# but we don't have an official sdk for it as we didn't have the expertise on the team and haven't gotten around to outsourcing this yet. Would you (or anyone reading this) be interested by any chance, and has the credentials (github account with relevant projects) shoot an email to kvz@transloadit.com : )
  - brianwawok 9y ago
    Only people with github projects can code a simple wrapper for you? Those bitbucket heathens.

zxstreak 9y ago

Our website and app are heavily replying on the image servers. https://www.ywart.com https://www.ywart.com

giaour 9y ago

There's no AWS service that does this, but you can set something up using Lambda, API Gateway, and S3. There's an example repo at https://github.com/awslabs/serverless-image-resizing https://github.com/awslabs/serverless-image-resizing

baybal2 9y ago
It will be different: Aliyun gives you transcoding/resizing on every CDN endpoint (which they have many) vs resizing in DC
- BillinghamJ 9y ago
  Could potentially do it with Lambda@Edge
  - sudhirj 9y ago
    If you can resize in under 50ms with less than 128mb RAM usages, maybe. With the current constraints JSON and text transforms are more feasible.
forgot-my-pw 9y ago
Alternatively, you can use a 3rd party image engine on AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B019YEIK7M?qid=1500045387561&sr=0-7&ref_=srh_res_product_title https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B019YEIK7M?qid=1500045... It should be a lot faster.

wener 9y ago

Please don't trust any Chinese company will protect your data, because even my company will sale or buy some personal data, we will gather as much data as we can.

sschueller 9y ago
How is this limited to China?
2pointsomone 9y ago
Hey that's not cool. How can you just disqualify a company that way just because they are Chinese? Alibaba is an excellent company with a lot of integrity.
- arihant 9y ago
  I think the trust deficit towards Chinese companies is due to their government. The government can just force their companies to hand over all data. They already do for their own citizens.
  - dirktheman 9y ago
    As opposed to the US...?
    - jjeaff 9y ago
      In the US, there is due process. Granted, that due process has been seriously eroded over the years in cases where the government can claim terrorism, but otherwise, it still takes a court order to force a company to comply with a government request for information.
      - zorked 9y ago
        Is due process that has been eroded over the years still due process? Where do we draw the line?

porker 9y ago

There's always http://cloudinary.com/ http://cloudinary.com/

nkkollaw 9y ago

Does it work for GIFs? I've just launched https://www.gifsonic.com https://www.gifsonic.com for resizing animated GIFs, and I'm still trying to figure out how useful it is...

jhgg 9y ago
Gif resizing is pretty hard. We've spent some pretty substantial effort in doing gif resizes for our infra. Out of curiosity, what library is your saas backed by?
- codedokode 9y ago
  Imagemagick can resize gifs.
  - nkkollaw 9y ago
    They look pretty bad, though.
- nkkollaw 9y ago
  I'm using a mix of FFmpeg, Gifsicle, and Vips depending on the transformation that is being applied. GIFs resized with FFmpeg will look great if everything is set up correctly, but if you need other effects it gets really tricky.

dpix 9y ago

I wrote a blog post about how to set this up on an Elastic Beanstalk instance. As well as uploading images directly to S3 rather than double handling them on your own backend. https://pickledsoftware.co.nz/jekyll/update/2017/02/14/Hosting-images-an-easier-way.html https://pickledsoftware.co.nz/jekyll/update/2017/02/14/Hosti...

wanghq 9y ago

Glad that you find it useful. I'd like to point out that lambda+s3 notification solution is asynchronous, while this OSS feature does transformation synchronously and can be applied to any objects (not just the new ones which could trigger functions), which is pretty awesome. I work for Alibaba Cloud. Drop me an email (in my profile) if you're interested in the opportunities. Yes, we have office in Seattle (Bellevue).

GordonS 9y ago
Do you guys take on remote workers ?
- wanghq 9y ago
  Probably not at this time. There are some openings in Bay area as well: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/alibaba-group-jobs-san-mateo-ca/ https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/alibaba-group-jobs-san-mateo-c...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jychang 9y ago
I currently live in Bellevue, not looking for a job right now but where is the Alibaba Cloud office? Downtown? Factoria near T-Mobile? Crossroads near MS campus?
- gtirloni 9y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?q=alibaba+seattle https://www.google.com/search?q=alibaba+seattle
- wanghq 9y ago
  It's here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/City+Center+Bellevue/@47.6149813,-122.1979755,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x54906c885197d883:0x22eda30d772c3ba8!8m2!3d47.6149813!4d-122.1957815 https://www.google.com/maps/place/City+Center+Bellevue/@47.6...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

sudhirj 9y ago

For an AWS equivalent, can deploy https://github.com/RealImage/concave https://github.com/RealImage/concave on Lambda+API Gateway in the same region as the source images s3 bucket, and stick a Cloudfront distribution in front of it. Hit me up at sudhir.j@gmail.com if you need help.

sudhirj 9y ago
Used in production at http://www.moviebuff.com http://www.moviebuff.com and https://www.justickets.in https://www.justickets.in if you want to see it in action.

grillwork 9y ago

i use cloudinary for these same type of features over AWS. Their libraries and UX isn't always the best but their transformation features are out of this world good.

neya 9y ago

I use a (not so well known) feature with Google AppEngine - Images API. It's pretty awesome as well. Works really well for web applications with basic image manipulation requirements. https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python/images/ https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/python/imag... The best part is, you call your image with specific parameters that'll do transformations on the fly. For example, <image url>/image.jpg?s=120 will return a 120px image. Appending -c will give you a cropped version, etc.

amrit_b 9y ago
Reminds me of something similar I did with videos couple of years back - http://www.transcode.io/ http://www.transcode.io/

agopaul 9y ago

There are other Saas services for that, like https://www.imgix.com/ https://www.imgix.com/. Not sure if this plays well with S3 out of the box though

asadjb 9y ago
I am using Imgix for a personal photography site and it works great with S3. You point it to an S3 bucket, give it the access keys, and then use the URL they provide instead of the S3 bucket URL. Using various query params, you can then control a bunch of transformations to the images that are applied on the fly when requested.

nicozhangw 9y ago

Another company named qiniu offers this feature

baybal2 9y ago

Not only they provide real-time resizing on CDN, but many many many other things: hardware HTTPS acceleration (check their HTTP vs HTTPS latency,) per-file authentication, hardware Gzip, 'bouncer' for websocket connections. They used to provide free load balancing on the edge for APIs, but I can't find that service in the control panel anymore.

jijajoltz 9y ago

try this: http://pageload.io http://pageload.io - proxy that goes between your origin and cdn or users and optimizes content for you. per host pricing.

forgot-my-pw 9y ago

You can use this on AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B019YEIK7M?qid=1500045387561&sr=0-7&ref_=srh_res_product_title https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B019YEIK7M?qid=1500045... It's really fast and can do image resize on the fly. They wrote the engine in C and Assembly. Should be way faster than ImageMagick.

smcnally 9y ago

Automattic's Photon does this, too. https://developer.wordpress.com/docs/photon/api/ https://developer.wordpress.com/docs/photon/api/