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Comment by kevinsd | Hacker News Reader

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=a...

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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/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.

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

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).

Do you guys take on remote workers ?

Probably not at this time. There are some openings in Bay area as well: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/alibaba-group-jobs-san-mateo-c...

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?

https://www.google.com/search?q=alibaba+seattle

It's here: https://www.google.com/maps/place/City+Center+Bellevue/@47.6...

So not in Seattle.

It's quite common to include the nearest major city, especially when your city is more or less a suburb of it. People outside the Puget Sound aren't going to know where Bellevue is. Redmond is probably the only other well known city in the sound, because of Microsoft.

It's why EA has an office in Vancouver/Burnaby (http://www2.ea.com/locations/vancouver), or Microsoft has an office in Tel Aviv/Ra'anana (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/mtc/locations/telaviv.aspx) not to mention another one in Tel Aviv/Herzliya, etc.

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.

How is this limited to China?

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.

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.

As opposed to the US...?

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.

Is due process that has been eroded over the years still due process? Where do we draw the line?

There's no need to draw a line; it's a risk continuum. With no due process at all, China is a higher risk option than three US.

*the US

Thanks autocorrect!

Right now, apparently at terrorism. And there is still a line, a court must approve it, might be a kangaroo court, but a judge is signing off on things.

Due process? Ha. Arrested in NYC way back when.

Rights read. NO. Telephone call.NO. Why was I just arrested? WHO KNOWS? I need my lawyer. HA. You can't hold me for over 24 hours for nothing?

You don't like it? Sue us. The NYC tax payers will end paying all the costs. HA HA HA

My experience with "Due Process" in the USA. At least I got out alive, in China may have been different.

Thank you NYC taxpayers for that $1000 settlement check after legal fees. :-)

So your rights were violated and you got legal recourse. Your complaint is?

That it shouldn't have happened in the first place? That our legal process is pretty damn broken? I have a similar story in NYC except I never sued so I didn't get a check. Just a massive waste of my time, energy and money and no recourse.

I think it is pretty clear that his complaint is that his rights were violated in the first place.

For which he received compensation.

the worrying fact is that the govt is whole and sole of the society, it can happen that one day they just kick out the company from mainland. Just like Google left china few years back, I don't think US is this bad. I hope not.

The US doesn't have a great firewall they force all data to go through which they utilize to weaponize javascript served from their own companies to international citizens. China does this. They used their great firewall to modify Baidu javascript to serve malware to international users to turn web browsers into a DDoS against github. All because github hosted projects that allowed Chinese citizens to read the uncensored web.

So, no, you can't trust anything hosted in mainland China. And, no, it's not the same as the US.

How's that different for any other country?

Due process, transparency, the option to overthrow the government. China has none of these. Hell, their government can ban the words "net neutrality" and "freedom" if they want to tomorrow, with no protest or recourse options. Very few countries have these kinds of constraints on companies.

Wener seems to be Chinese and working for a Chinese company [1]. They didn't state their reasons for not trusting Alibaba clearly, but that doesn't mean they're speaking from ignorance or prejudice.

I have no solid opinion myself, as I have no real knowledge either way.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12478652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12478772

I think we are also conditioned to not trust China. Certainly in the U.K. coverage about China is always negative, from dog stews to mafia-styled political stories. And of course the fact that China is gobbling so much and so fast ... Alibaba is apparently much bigger than Google and Amazon combined. Who's to say that Alibaba isn't the commercial face of the Chinese government? I think that's what we're really wary about.

Rational or irrational, we're definitely jealous, so whatever, that's high compliment for China. But China really is becoming a super, which means it's a threat to the old order. In South East Asia, it was once unthinkable to not see the US as an ally. Now this is shifting, for better or for worse cough South China Sea

> even my company will sale or buy some personal data, we will gather as much data as we can.

What does this even mean? What is the subtext here? Because your company (which one?) is regarded as high status (higher than Alibaba?) / serious about data protection (but then you say it sells personal data?) ?

The practice of your company has no bearing of the practice of Alibaba. Alibaba could be better, Alibaba could also be worse.

Disclosure: I'm a Chinese working oversea and am genuinely interested in reacquaint myself with the business practice in China.

You are just racist.

Hmm. If it's something you despise, then why do you still work for them?

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

It will be different: Aliyun gives you transcoding/resizing on every CDN endpoint (which they have many) vs resizing in DC

Could potentially do it with Lambda@Edge

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.

Alternatively, you can use a 3rd party image engine on AWS: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B019YEIK7M?qid=1500045...

It should be a lot faster.

It's actually not that bad doing it in the browser these days with something like https://github.com/nodeca/pica

Saves upload time for large images at the very least

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?

This also applies to resizing assists before upload from the client to the endpoint.

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.

Here's a great blog post on how to use it. https://medium.com/google-cloud/uploading-resizing-and-servi...

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

I add my support as Imgix being a great service.

Imgix is unbelievable. The filters are useful, the support is great but above all the prices are excellent.

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.

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?

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.

Ah been there with the imagemagick in several companies, would never go that way again.

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.

The prices are excellent if you have a small number of images read/processed many times over a month. If you have a large number of images touched only a few times a month, it's horrendously expensive.

For example I can thumbnail ~7M images in ~2 days on my dedicated machine (40/s) which costs me $60/mo to colocate. $60/mo gets me a paltry 20k images from Imgix (though admittedly I can process them multiple times for the same price, I don't need to).

Out of curiosity, what CDN does deliver 7M for $60/mo with sourcing from your colocated server?

For me Imgix is primarily a cheap CDN with the benefit of unlimited sizes of each image depending on the device.

The $60 above doesn't include bandwidth from either my transit provider or Imgix, you can purchase a CDN separately.

Imgix is 8c/GB which is certainly competitive but by no means unique. CloudFront is only $0.005 more expensive on the higest tier and gets as low as $0.02 on the lowsest. A cheaper CDN like CDN77 starts at $0.049/GB and goes as low as $0.007/GB.

Cloudfront charges for requests and it can often be the biggest component of your bill.

CDN77 performance in terms of latency is not that great. If you are looking for a cheap CDN with good performance, buy edgecast from a reseller. The only problem with edgecast is that they charge a really high fee for SSL support for custom domains

Disclosure, I am from imgix. If you start to exceed $500/month we can offer discounts and certainly when you are looking at millions of images then a flat rate at a lower level makes a lot more sense. 30 million unique images certainly should not be $90,000, that would be outrageous.

Right. In my last two jobs, one of them had a relatively low volume of images (let's say, around 30k being requested per month) scaled to an arbitrary number of transformations, whilst the other had a high volume of images (millions) with a low number of transformations.

In both cases, the cost of doing it ourselves (using something like thumbor) would have been a few thousand per month. In the former example, imgix cost a few hundred, in the latter it would have cost in the hundreds of thousands.

imgix is the fastest of the services i've looked at (transformation time is roughly half what I got from cloudinary, and average response time is also about half), but its pricing model means it's completely unaffordable for certain types of product.

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

Disclosure: Transloadit founder

Why do you not have code samples in c#?

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 : )

Only people with github projects can code a simple wrapper for you? Those bitbucket heathens.

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

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.

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.

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.

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/Hosti...

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

Does it work for GIFs?

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

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?

Imagemagick can resize gifs.

They look pretty bad, though.

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.

You can use this on AWS: 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.

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.

For an AWS equivalent, can deploy 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.

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

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

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

Another company named qiniu offers this feature

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

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