The cloud as an operational model is all about lower capital expenditures and making operations more efficient. Among the cloud vendors extending the model today is startup Cloudinary, which is aiming to solve the challenge of image management and manipulation at scale.
Itai Lahan, CEO of Cloudinary, explained to Datamation that his company is aiming to make it easier to help websites and online services to store and manage images in the cloud. Lahan noted that many websites have different needs for images including tagging and moderation as well as manipulation.
Protecting your company’s data is critical. Cloud storage with automated backup is scalable, flexible and provides peace of mind. Cobalt Iron’s enterprise-grade backup and recovery solution is known for its hands-free automation and reliability, at a lower cost. Cloud backup that just works.
In terms of direct customers, Lahan said Cloudinary already has over 20,000 registered customers in the one and half years since the company was officially launched. From a funding perspective, Lahan has not taken any venture financing and the company is completely bootstrapped. Currently he said that Cloudinary is managing over 100 million images in its cloud.
The issue that many websites have is that they have built their own solutions for image management, which isn’t a cost effective or scalable approach.
“We’re all about providing a comprehensive solution for images, a place where all of the image-related tasks that web developers encounter can be dealt with,” Lahan said. “From upload to delivery and everything in between.”
From an implementation perspective, most content management systems today already have some form of image management in place. Lahan said that the Cloudinary service includes a rich API layer that enables organizations to integrate with existing capabilities that might already be present. Lahan said that Cloudinary has direct integration for the popular open-source WordPress content management system, and can act as a replacement for the default media library. The Cloudinary model takes security very seriously with granular user permission controls throughout the image workflow.
Infrastructure
From an infrastructure perspective, Cloudinary itself sit on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is running on Linux servers.
“The majority of our server farm is auto-scaling servers that are for the image manipulation piece,” Lahan said. “That is taking an image, cropping it and doing whatever manipulation that a person wants.”
For the database piece, Cloudinary is using the open-source MySQL database technology.
“We are very knowledgeable in the NoSQL area but we’ve had a lot of discussion about our database use and for us MySQL is the answer,” Lahan said.
For the image manipulation piece, Cloudinary leverages multiple technologies, including the open-source ImageMagick project.
All of Cloudinary’s client integration libraries are open-source and available on the company’s Github site.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Datamation and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist
Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.
Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
December 04, 2020
Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
November 18, 2020
Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA
FEATURE | By Guest Author,
November 10, 2020
FEATURE | By Samuel Greengard,
November 05, 2020
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
November 02, 2020
How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
October 29, 2020
Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
October 23, 2020
The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
October 16, 2020
FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
October 07, 2020
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Guest Author,
October 05, 2020
CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science
FEATURE | By Guest Author,
September 25, 2020
Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 25, 2020
Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2020
FEATURE | By Cynthia Harvey,
September 22, 2020
NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
September 18, 2020
Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By James Maguire,
September 14, 2020
Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By James Maguire,
September 13, 2020
IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 11, 2020
Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality
FEATURE | By James Maguire,
September 09, 2020
Anticipating The Coming Wave Of AI Enhanced PCs
FEATURE | By Rob Enderle,
September 05, 2020
The Critical Nature Of IBM’s NLP (Natural Language Processing) Effort
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE | By Rob Enderle,
August 14, 2020
Datamation is the leading industry resource for B2B data professionals and technology buyers. Datamation's focus is on providing insight into the latest trends and innovation in AI, data security, big data, and more, along with in-depth product recommendations and comparisons. More than 1.7M users gain insight and guidance from Datamation every year.
Advertise with TechnologyAdvice on Datamation and our other data and technology-focused platforms.
Advertise with Us
Property of TechnologyAdvice.
© 2025 TechnologyAdvice. All Rights Reserved
Advertiser Disclosure: Some of the products that appear on this
site are from companies from which TechnologyAdvice receives
compensation. This compensation may impact how and where products
appear on this site including, for example, the order in which
they appear. TechnologyAdvice does not include all companies
or all types of products available in the marketplace.