I have used Cloudinary a few times with my rails apps for super quick and easy set up and some nice functionality. Normally these are small side projects so I'm not worrying about future growth and strain on the app.
What are peoples thoughts on using it for larger apps as apose to setting up with AWS and a refile/paperclip gem for example?
We are using it to serve content for our image-heavy special marketing campaign pages and mobile apps, heavily using it to serve different image sizes based on device (we are mobile first and have to look good on all devices). We have always been bound by bandwidth, never by any other metric (~1TB / month). In addition, their automatic conversion (our designers for example sometimes upload .ai files) and image minimization helps us to speedup delivery & minimize bandwidth on the one side, on the other side it makes live easier for our designers and more flexible for us if we later want to use the same image somewhere else.
Last, but not least, their image manipulation with overlays allows very fancy stuff which we use to generate "sticker" images (see the URLs here: api-md15.dealini.ch/cardUnits) and we could not replicate this feature with any of their competition.
One final note: Their engineering team is super-fast, e.g. it took them ~1 week from "we need to use .ai files as transparent overlays" to implementation and deployment. And this happened for several feature requests!
I have used cloudinary with rails and found it to be a much better alternative than paperclip or carrierwave or using image magick. Storage and speed wise its as good as any other CDN. Another big win for cloudinary is that its one stop solution for your image transformations and storage.
Probably the one limitation is that you can only make upto 500 API calls/hour in free tier and upto 2000 calls/hour in basic tier. This might be an issue for larger apps.
Sandeep Panda
co-founder, Hashnode
At Hashnode we are using Cloudinary and are pretty happy with it. I am not sure what type of projects you are working on, but Cloudinary is great for content driven sites like us. We show different versions of the same image on different pages. Doing this manually i.e resizing, cropping, detecting face, generating thumbs etc is a little painful. This is where Cloudinary does a great job.
They have released SDKs for many languages - this is definitely a plus. As Cloudinary uses Akamai to serve your images, you also get speed. Previously we were using S3/Cloudfront combination to store and serve images, but I found cloudfront to be slow. Cloudinary, on the other hand, is doing a great job in both image storage and delivery.