Welcome to the IPaaS Blog!

We, at Blitline, created this blog to provide technologists like you with best practices related to cloud-based image processing, insights into why Internet/Software and Media companies should migrate to an outsourced Image Processing as a Service (IPaaS) solution if they haven’t already, and important factors to consider when evaluating approaches, solutions and suppliers to optimize image processing.

As a method of enacting some sort of operation on an image (e.g. resizing, cropping, sharpening, overlaying, watermarking, converting file types, and any other number of other image processing manipulations), image processing is required for virtually any web or mobile application, digital platform, or online website.

For applications with images and other file types (e.g. video, audio, documents, etc.) that move dynamically in and out of their platform, image processing is truly a mission critical function that can impact customer experience, platform innovation and competitiveness, devops resources, accrued technical debt, security, intellectual property (IP) protection, gross margins, and so much more.

What is Image Processing as a Service (IPaaS)?
We define IPaaS as a method as an enterprise-grade image processing licensing and delivery model in which the software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted.

IPaaS is an enterprise-grade alternative to homegrown internally built systems, often using Open Source solutions like ImageMagick (which we love at Blitline and integrate into our JSON API libraries), or to installed software solutions.  Blitline, Transloadit, and Imgix are a few of the leading companies in the space.

Why Do IPaaS Solutions Exist?
While there are literally hundreds of reasons IPaaS solutions exist, including some of those that we’ve mentioned above, the “50,000 foot view” reason is that it just doesn’t make sense to re-create the wheel by building an in-house image processing solution when there are better pre-built solutions that already exist. We’ll dig into some of these reasons in upcoming posts.

Get Image Processing Insights by Signing Up for the IPaaS Blog
We look forward to sharing our image processing insights in future blog posts.  Don’t be shy! Please let us know if there are any topics or challenges that you’d like us to cover or to discuss privately. In the meanwhile, we hope you’ll sign up to receive alerts when future IPaaS blog posts are published.