Explore image hosting services to replace S3

[flagrede]

We're currently using S3 as our image provider. S3 does not provide any utilities to transform and manipulate images and we have to do all this work on the client. Using one could potentially save us significant engineering time and improve our performance by having smaller images.

The goal of this task is to explore some image hosting providers to see the features they provide and the benefits we could get from them. Some examples are:

• https://cloudinary.com/
• https://www.cloudimage.io/en/home
• https://imgix.com/

[wgwz]

As noted earlier, we have a library called express-sharp already set up in the registry-server and it serves/can serve a similar purpose, i.e. resizing and caching of images from our s3 bucket on server-side. If this task could point out some pro’s/con’s of this tool in addition to the others, that’d be great. Specifically a description of what problems we’re needing to solve here would be good too, just so making a choice is well defined.

https://github.com/pmb0/express-sharp

Thanks for opening the task @flagrede !

[blushi]

Hey team! Please add your planning poker estimate with Zenhub @flagrede @wgwz

[blushi]

@wgwz could you add your estimate on this one please? thanks

[wgwz]

i was between a 3 and 5 since it involves a few different platforms and that can be a good amount of evaluation work

[blushi]

any thoughts @flagrede? (3 or 5)

[flagrede]

I was hesitating too, let's go for a 5 as this is an important part of the stack.

[flagrede]

Exploration finding:

• hosted image services might be a bit too expensive?
• we might want to start with what's already setup on the registry server if want on the fly resize

Suggestions:

• as a minimal next step not involving too much refactoring we could replace the complex client side cropping by a simple component to define the cropping gravity and rely on registry server for the rest