Accelerating product development is every entrepreneur’s dream. CEOs, Product Managers, Business owners, Indie developers, agencies, dev shops, and anyone that itches to launch a product to the market aims to do so in the shortest possible time.
Getting the product to market is one thing; adding more features rapidly & giving customers what they want is another herculean task.
Bringing new products to life in Fortune 500s and large organizations also requires time and effort. As a result, many companies opt to develop their infrastructure in-house to achieve well-tailored needs. However, this challenge is the time and money required to build this infrastructure from the ground up. The larger your organization, the more time and money it takes to develop architecture in-house.
So, how can a composable tech stack help? First, what’s composable architecture?
Composable architecture refers to a software design approach in which the system is built as a set of independent, modular components that can be combined and connected to form a larger application. It’s based on swappable modules, services and APIs. In addition, they provide open pathways and open communication lines between each application in the stack.
Every component can be swapped quickly and improved in a composable tech stack to meet your business needs. Additionally, when setting up a composable architecture, your tech stack & APIs should be able to communicate seamlessly regardless of language.
Visual products here refer to products that involve a lot of media assets delivery, manipulation and management. Products that deal with hundreds of images, videos, media asset transformations, files e.t.c
In a composable tech stack, your media layer can be a programmable API or a flexible SaaS product that enables several teams in your organization to perform end-to-end rich media management and delivery!
Let’s see how you can launch and manage visual products with a composable tech stack using Cloudinary.
Cloudinary offers resources that empower developers, managers, markets and organizations with a media-centric composable architecture. It’s the essential media layer for an evolving and composable digital technology stack.
One way in which Cloudinary can be used as part of a composable tech stack is through its APIs, which allow developers to upload, transform, and deliver media assets in real-time. For example, you can use Cloudinary’s APIs to resize images on the fly, apply image filters, or add watermarks to images. These APIs can be easily integrated into a larger application, allowing developers to leverage Cloudinary’s media management capabilities without having to build their own media management infrastructure.
Brands like Rapha, Mattel, and River Island depend on Cloudinary’s SaaS and API-first approach to manage and optimize their media assets & experience at scale.
Let’s explore how Cloudinary can be used as part of a composable tech stack below:
Cloudinary provides some beautiful and straightforward to-integrate widgets that can replace in-house built infrastructure in your stack.
- Upload Widget: A plug-and-play widget (requires few lines of code) that allows customers to upload multiple files from different sources (at least 7) to your website or app.
- Media Library Widget: A plug-and-play widget (requires few lines of code) that allows all your users to quickly select images, videos, PDFs, or other stored raw files directly from Cloudinary and insert them in a way that exactly fits your application design, required behavior, and overall workflow.
- Media Editor: A plug-and-play widget (requires few lines of code) providing a set of everyday image editing actions to your users on your website or app. The editor helps to scale internal operations by reducing dependency on designers for simple recurring tasks. Combined with AI for automating simple actions, this allows manual review/fixing of media assets when needed.
These widgets can be easily integrated into a larger application, allowing developers to leverage Cloudinary’s media management capabilities without having to build their own media management infrastructure.
Cloudinary offers a [digital asset management (DAM) platform] https://cloudinary.com/documentation/digital_asset_management_overview) that unifies teams on one media source of truth.
The platform accelerates product development by enabling the marketing and creative teams to collaborate via a simple-to-use visual platform. The engineering team is also included because it enables them to programmatically upload, store, and transform media assets to the same platform for all the other teams to see and use.
Note: Check out the Cloudinary’s Ultimate Digital Asset Management Guide.
Cloudinary offers certified integration with platforms and has partnered with system integrators around the globe. These integrations enable you to leverage Cloudinary with various cms eCommerce platforms such as Magento, Salesforce, SAP commerce, Shopify, Zapier, GraphCMS, Contentful, Magnolia, Chioro, Sanity, Stackbit, Vue Storefront etc.
The integrations make it easy for you to use any tech platform with Cloudinary. Find out more about these integrations.
Note: There are also partner marketplaces such as Google Cloud Platform, AWS and Heroku for fast, and easily launchable experiences.
You can add an API media layer to your existing websites and apps to manage your visual media assets. Cloudinary offers the following media-as-a-service APIs that can be used for the end-to-end management of visual assets in your composable stack. Powerful image and video APIs for editing, hosting and delivering global content distribution for websites and cloud apps:
- Upload API: This is a rate-unlimited API that enables you to upload your media assets (resources) and provides a wide range of functionality, including basic and advanced asset management, metadata management, and asset generation.
- Transformation API: This API enables you to deliver media assets, including a large variety of on-the-fly transformations, through the use of URL parameters. This reference comprehensively covers all URL transformation parameters, including syntax, value details, and examples.
- Admin API: This is a rate-limited API that provides complete control of all media assets (resources), upload presets, named transformations and other product environment entities.
- Search API: This API allows you fine control filtering and retrieving information on all the assets in your production environment with the help of query expressions in a Lucene-like query language.
One excellent feature of Cloudinary’s offering is the A.I and machine learning enablement on all the media assets.
With this intelligence, you activate background removal, object aware cropping, and automatic image tagging for use on any image and video.
Now you see that you can launch and manage visual products faster with tens and hundreds of teams via a composable tech stack. Here are some resources below to arm and get you well-grounded with the whys and benefits of composable architectures.
Five tips for building a modern composable stack
Why MACH Architectures Are Building the Future of Open Technology Systems
