I did some work for an ecommerce consultancy a couple of years ago where we were literally looking a a customer's request for "ability for customers to upload p

I did some work for an ecommerce consultancy a couple of years ago where we were literally looking a a customer's request for "ability for customers to upload photos of themselves wearing our clothing" and saying, "Why isn't there a white box image service?" Now there is. To those who have not dealt with user-generated media content, it is easy to underestimate the amount of effort involved in building a secure, monitorable system. Building an image grinding pipeline is non-trivial, even though all the open source tools are of high quality. Once users start uploading photos, marketing will realize that they need to be cropped, resized, and enhanced. As soon as your users upload the first pieces of questionable content, you will have to build an image moderation app. Then, you have to build a feature where the user sees his own photos on the site privately when logged in because users hate the lack of immediacy. Then, your marketing people will ask for video. Totally separate pipeline. Then, someone will upload custom-generated 40Kx40k single-color jpgs to see if your image crunching pipeline allows denial of service attacks. Once you get your first upload of child pornography, your legal team will become much more interested and ask how you are ensuring the destruction of these images from all your servers. Now, you'll learn that a reasonable portion of your bandwidth is being used to serve up deep-linked content for sketchy sites. Oh, and other stuff will happen too. Then, you'll see the value of Chute.