Cloudinary

Cloudinary is a Content Delivery Network service, or CDN for short. Powered by Akamai, it was made popular by it's impressive handling of media serving, images in particular. CDN has been covered in a little more detail in the developer guidelines section.

Q: Why use a third party service to handle website images when we have enough storage space on our server?

A: Indeed, there may be sufficient space to store static files on the server and have them served from within the application code space itself, but that places additional load on the server (the computer containing the website's code, continually hooked to the internet, with it's IP address masked by the domain name www.gravitaspremierleague.com, or http://gpl.ieeecsvit.com).

Think of it like this: With images bundled in with the code, the server has to do extra work fetching those images from the images directory. Delegating this task of fetching images to a CDN, as described above, will not only reduce load on the server, but also speed up requests.

HOW? Any decent CDN service has it's nodes scattered across the globe, about a few tens on every continent. Thereby, there is a local server belonging to this CDN service provider, which in all likelihood is physically closer than the application server to most of the users.

In short, the packets of data containing image information have to be transmitted a shorter distance, thereby reducing latency, speeding up response times, keeping your server less busy.

There are no major changes to be made to any project for Cloudinary integration, apart from adding the Cloudinary prefix to all src attributes on img tags. Create a Cloudinary account and play around with some of the features to gain finer understanding.