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Case study on the FT's Responsive Image Service

Case study on the FT's Responsive Image Service

Presentation given at a Cloudinary meetup on moving from our hand rolled image service to one backed by cloudinary

Alice Bartlett

April 24, 2017
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  1. Alice Bartlett Senior Developer, Financial Times @alicebartlett Case study: moving

    from a hand rolled image service to a 3rd party solution
  2. Origami is a 4 person team who develop frontend tools

    and services at the FT @alicebartlett
  3. Today I’m going to talk about one of our services:

    the Image Service @alicebartlett
  4. 1. How the FT works 2. Image Service V1 3.

    Why rebuild 4. How’s that rebuild going?
  5. Teams all over the world Some are built in-house Some

    are built by agencies Some are actively maintained Some aren’t @alicebartlett
  6. It isn’t practical to assume that everyone building websites at

    the FT understands the latest image technologies @alicebartlett
  7. “teams are allowed and encouraged to pick the best value

    tools for the job at hand, be they things developed and supported by internal teams or external to the company” Matt Chadburn, Principal Developer Next.ft.com http://matt.chadburn.co.uk/notes/teams-as-services.html
  8. Origami’s Image Service must be really easy to use or

    people won’t use it. @alicebartlett
  9. 1. How the FT works 2. Image Service V1 3.

    Why rebuild 4. How’s that rebuild going?
  10. • resizing • compression • conversion between formats • tinting

    • sprite creation • imagesets • meta-data • dpr • background color fallback • quality • utf-data hacks @alicebartlett v1 features:
  11. 1. How the FT works 2. Image Service V1 3.

    Why rebuild 4. How’s that rebuild going?
  12. @alicebartlett The Image Service had a key man dependency on

    Kornel Lesiński, who wrote most of it.
  13. @alicebartlett In the time since we built the Image Service,

    some new SaaS image handling providers had come along
  14. 1. How the FT works 2. Image Service V1 3.

    Why rebuild 4. How’d that rebuild work out?
  15. It took us about 3 months to ship v2 of

    the Image Service (1.5 people working on it) @alicebartlett
  16. This change has brought the size of the FT.com homepage

    from 2Mb of images to 727Kb* @alicebartlett
  17. Overall, by switching to Cloudinary we saw a drop in

    file size for the same quality @alicebartlett
  18. The running cost of a Cloudinary backed service is working

    out at about the same as running our V1 service @alicebartlett