CASE 135 · HAWK · 2024
Image hosting, brought back inside the AWS account.
An online publishing company paid Cloudinary $14,800/month for image hosting and on-the-fly transformations. The application was AWS-hosted; every image request went out of the AWS network and back. We replicated the transformation capability on CloudFront + Lambda@Edge and moved storage to S3.
Online publishing
MIGRATION
2024
RESULTS
What changed, by the numbers.
IMAGE HOSTING BILL
−78%
TRANSFORMATIONS COVERED
94%
LATENCY
−180ms
STORAGE OWNED
AWS
HOW IT WENT
Cloudinary had been ideal at the company’s smaller scale — instant on-the-fly transforms, no infrastructure to operate. At publishing scale, the bill plus the cross-network egress made it conspicuous. The transformation set the editorial team actually used turned out to be small.
Lambda@Edge ran Sharp against master images stored in S3, with parameters in the URL path matching Cloudinary’s URL conventions (so client code didn’t need to change). CloudFront cached every transform; the second-and-after request paid no Lambda cost. The 6% of Cloudinary features we couldn’t cleanly replicate were edge cases the team agreed to drop.
Bill dropped 78%. Latency improved 180ms at p75 because edge proximity is genuinely closer for most users than Cloudinary’s global routing was. Storage moved inside the AWS account, eliminating the cross-network egress entirely.
RELATED · SAME DOMAIN
Other engagements in this space.
READY WHEN YOU ARE
Let's get your AWS bill (and architecture) in order.
The discovery call is free. You walk away with at least one concrete idea — even if we never work together.