Why Switch from In-House Image Processing to a File Processing-as-a-Service (FPaaS) Solution?
"We have zero costs performing image processing with Image Magick or files with FFmpeg so why should we switch?"
This is a common objection we receive at Blitline when we approach CTOs, software engineering leads, developers and others for the first time, introducing them to our enterprise grade file processing-as-a-service (FPaaS) solution as an alternative to Image Magick, FFmpeg and other Open Source solutions.
One DevOps pro even proclaimed "It almost seems like heresy thinking about not using ImageMagick."
Yet software companies with technology platforms - in digital asset management (DAM), content management, customer relationship management, collaboration, EdTech, and other verticals - and media companies both are increasingly migrating to Blitline and other FPaaS solution providers as they discover the strategic advantages and true total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits such as:
- Elimination of work, costs and technical debt related to maintaining libraries
- Infrastructure costs, both machines and bandwidth, to operate ImageMagick and FFMPEG
- Built-in handling of default settings for the various libraries
- Improved security from continuously updated components
- Ensuring cross-library version compatibility
- Automated handling for errors and failovers
- Multiple retry and alternate library failover functionality
- Greater scalability without the skyrocketing costs
One Blitline client summarized his thoughts in a recent LinkedIn post, writing:
"When we developed Asset Bank, our flagship DAM solution, we used ImageMagick and FFmpeg and definitely have the scars to prove it! However, even though we have extensive knowledge of those tools in-house, we use Blitline in our latest DAM platform, Dash. This is part of a general strategy to use best-of-breed cloud services wherever we can to start with, and then to replace these if and when cost/benefit analysis indicates that we should. In many cases, it never will.
Lean software development would be much harder without third-party cloud services. It’s worth mentioning that one disadvantage of using IPaaS [Image Processing-as-a-Service] (and other cloud services), especially in a DAM solution, is that if the service is hosted outside your infrastructure with a different cloud provider, a significant extra cost will be from moving large files around. We find Blitline’s pricing very reasonable, so the most likely reason for us to do the image processing ourselves in the future would be to avoid AWS transfer fees, which are far more than we spend on Blitline itself. (I know that Blitline has some options for minimising file transfers, which Jason Malcolm was very helpful in explaining to me)."
If you're interested in digging further into the benefits described above, then we encourage you to visit our Why Blitline webpage here.
Happy reading and stay tuned for one of our next customer-inspired posts examining file conversion challenges and increasing AWS transfer fees.