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Cloudinary plans to integrate its image and video platform with Amazon CloudFront, extending its long-standing relationship with Amazon Web Services.
The integration is designed to let Amazon CloudFront users access Cloudinary tools within the AWS CloudFront console. Companies that store media in Amazon S3 will be able to enable it in a few clicks and start delivering optimised images and video within minutes, according to Cloudinary.
Aimed at developers and engineering teams that deliver content through CloudFront, the setup is intended to remove the need for custom code and avoid adding a separate media management tool.
Cloudinary has built on AWS since it was founded in 2012 and is an AWS Advanced Tier Technology Partner. Many of its customers already use CloudFront to deliver media, and Cloudinary cited an AWS case study saying existing customers using CloudFront see a 30 per cent performance improvement.
The deeper tie-up comes as companies manage growing libraries of digital media across eCommerce, publishing, marketing and customer-facing services. They are also dealing with traffic surges during shopping peaks, product launches and major campaigns, when delays or failures in image and video delivery can affect user experience and sales.
Under the planned integration, CloudFront customers will be able to add Cloudinary's image and video functions to an existing distribution. Cloudinary says this is intended to simplify setup, management, billing and support, while automatically adapting media for the viewer's device, browser, network and screen.
Media delivery
The partnership focuses on a common problem for digital teams: media assets often sit across different systems, formats and delivery routes. That can create operational complexity for businesses trying to maintain consistent performance across regions and devices.
AWS says the joint effort is intended to address that by combining CloudFront's global content delivery network with Cloudinary's media optimisation tools.
"Media is the heart of nearly every digital experience, and performance is non-negotiable. Together with Cloudinary, we're combining best-in-class media optimization with the worldwide reach of Amazon CloudFront to help customers deliver content that is fast, seamless, and consistent across every device and every region," said Megha Kande, Senior Manager, Amazon CloudFront Product Management, AWS.
Cloudinary presents the integration as a way to reduce technical overhead for teams serving images and video at scale. It is targeting both the engineers who manage delivery infrastructure and the business units that rely on them, including online retailers and digital publishers.
"Visual media is central to every digital experience, but developers shouldn't have to trade off quality, speed, and simplicity to deliver it at scale," said Tal Lev-Ami, Co-founder and CTO, Cloudinary. "By bringing Cloudinary's intelligent media capabilities into the CloudFront workflow, we're giving developers and engineering teams a simpler way to deliver media adapted to each viewer, without custom code or added operational complexity."
Customer base
Cloudinary says more than 4.5 million developers and 14,000 customers use its platform. Its named customers include Adidas, Etsy, Grubhub, Mattel, Minted, Paul Smith and Zalando.
It also says it works with an ecosystem of more than 300 partners, integrations and plug-ins. Its business centres on helping companies manage, transform, optimise and deliver visual content across websites, apps and digital campaigns.
The move highlights how infrastructure and software providers are trying to make specialist tools easier to use within existing cloud environments. For customers already using Amazon services such as S3 and CloudFront, tighter integrations can reduce implementation work and bring operational tasks into a single workflow.
For Cloudinary, the agreement places its software closer to customers already distributing media through AWS services. For AWS, it adds another specialist media option inside the CloudFront environment for customers handling large volumes of image and video traffic.
According to Cloudinary, the integration will support teams ranging from eCommerce groups serving product images across international storefronts to publishers managing large media libraries in multiple formats.