I was running WordPress on Google Cloud Run as a side project — testing whether it could work as a horizontally scalable, serverless CMS. Everything ran fine until I needed to offload media uploads to cloud storage.
The most popular offload plugin installed at 87MB. That's larger than WordPress core itself (73MB). On Vercel, where the entire function limit is 250MB, one plugin ate a third of the budget. Cold starts on Cloud Run got noticeably worse too.
The bloat came from bundling the full AWS SDK — 15,000+ files covering every AWS service — when the plugin only needed four API calls: PUT, DELETE, GET, and signed URL generation.
So I wrote direct REST calls with hand-rolled SigV4 auth instead. The result is CloudSync Master — 1.5MB installed, 10 cloud providers supported, async background uploads so the WordPress admin never locks up.
Free on WordPress.org: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-cloudsync-master
Full technical write-up on how we replaced the SDK: 1ts.hashnode.dev/why-we-ditched-the-aws-sdk-for-a…
Anyone else running WordPress in containers and fighting plugin size?
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