Blocks: #159
What
Currently we are serving our assets directly from an Amazon S3 bucket, not through a CDN. We signed up for the Free Tier service on the 10th of April, 2016, and will start being charged one year after (i.e. soon!).
In addition to this, going forward, we need to prioritise serving images quickly, revealing select image URLs securely in an API (signed), as well as being able to manipulate images easily.
Cloudinary is "a cloud-based service that provides an end-to-end image management solution including uploads, storage, manipulations, optimizations and delivery." In short, it should make our lives easier, and the free package does the job for us + does NOT expire. Thus, we should move our image management implementation over to Cloudinary. And ideally (but not necessarily) do it before the 10th of April.
How
There are several, detailed resources stepping through how to integrate Cloudinary with Rails, including how to migrate existing images over from another source:
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/cloudinary#using-with-ruby-on-rails
http://cloudinary.com/documentation/rails_integration#getting_started_guide
We may have to move over from using the current Paperclip gem to CarrierWave as this is more supported by Cloudinary. But if we want an intermediate step to migrating, there is a limited Paperclip-cloudinary gem we can look into using first.
Blocks: #159
What
Currently we are serving our assets directly from an Amazon S3 bucket, not through a CDN. We signed up for the Free Tier service on the 10th of April, 2016, and will start being charged one year after (i.e. soon!).
In addition to this, going forward, we need to prioritise serving images quickly, revealing select image URLs securely in an API (signed), as well as being able to manipulate images easily.
Cloudinary is "a cloud-based service that provides an end-to-end image management solution including uploads, storage, manipulations, optimizations and delivery." In short, it should make our lives easier, and the free package does the job for us + does NOT expire. Thus, we should move our image management implementation over to Cloudinary. And ideally (but not necessarily) do it before the 10th of April.
How
There are several, detailed resources stepping through how to integrate Cloudinary with Rails, including how to migrate existing images over from another source:
https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/cloudinary#using-with-ruby-on-rails
http://cloudinary.com/documentation/rails_integration#getting_started_guide
We may have to move over from using the current Paperclip gem to CarrierWave as this is more supported by Cloudinary. But if we want an intermediate step to migrating, there is a limited Paperclip-cloudinary gem we can look into using first.