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Without getting too into the weeds -- we do use OSS and third-party libraries where it makes sense. Our rendering pipeline incorporates things like mozjpeg, Int
by skuhn 10y ago
Without getting too into the weeds -- we do use OSS and third-party libraries where it makes sense. Our rendering pipeline incorporates things like mozjpeg, Intel IPP, jxrlib and other technologies. We're doing the integration and augmentation work to make this all play nicely together with the right quality and performance.
However, there is no off-the-shelf solution that solves the same core problem as the imgix pipeline. Resizing or format conversion, sure. That plus the types of graphical operations that Photoshop supports? Less common. Now do all of that in one pass in 30-50ms, streaming to/from the GPU, with the ability to easily add new workflows and operations? It's our core business, and we own that workflow completely inside of our stack.
We built on the foundation of CoreImage and that gave us a leg up -- we can take most of what we've built, replace the foundation and keep going on another platform (such as Linux). The main challenge is that there is no equivalent technology to CoreImage on any other platform. PIL (or Pillow) are adjacent technologies, but I can tell you from experience trying to operate a PIL-backed image thumbnailing service at scale it is not a large scale solution. Better than ImageMagick for sure, but it still has limitations. Even something like RenderMan is not tuned for this kind of workflow -- it's awesome at what it does, but latency and scale are not its central concerns.
There are risks to imgix's business, and this is one of them, but I'll be pretty surprised if it sinks us. We have some pretty sharp cookies working on our rendering platform, and while success on that front isn't guaranteed it's entirely within the realm of possibility.