Programmable Media

Programmable Media service introduction

Last updated: Mar-17-2024

Before you dive into the details of Cloudinary's many asset management features and begin adding Cloudinary Programmable Media capabilities to your application, we recommend that you review this page to gain a high-level understanding about the service architecture, asset storage, security, and other details about how the Cloudinary service works.

In addition to this page, don't miss:
  • Programmable Media Get Started Guide: Learn the steps involved and the questions you may need to consider at each step in order to successfully implement Cloudinary's Programmable Media capabilities in your application code, from initial account creation and setup, through to delivering transformed and optimized media in production.
  • SDK Quick Starts: Step-by-step copy-code snippets that help you get a Cloudinary Programmable Media project set up, configured and running in your favorite language in 5 minutes or less.
  • Try it! Code explorers and feature demos: Quick links to all the available inline code explorers, sandboxes, and interactive feature demos, designed to help you 'play & learn' with a variety of Cloudinary features.
  • Onboarding FAQ: A collection of the questions most commonly asked by developers who are evaluating or getting started with Cloudinary Programmable Media.

Service architecture

Cloudinary's media asset management service includes:

  • High performance servers behind Elastic Load Balancers that support fast upload and download rates.
  • Highly available storage that promises that your assets are always available and safe.
  • High performance media processing servers for generating your requested images and videos.

By default, assets are stored in Amazon S3 buckets that are privately accessed for writing. These can be shared buckets, dedicated buckets or private buckets.

Note
Google Cloud Storage is also available for primary and/or backup storage. This is a premium feature that requires a special setup. For more information, contact customer support.

service architecture

Delivery lifecycle

The asset delivery lifecycle consists of 5 stages: Upload, Storage, Administration, Transformation, and Delivery.

Once the original file has been uploaded to Cloudinary, you can manage the asset via secured APIs or the Cloudinary Console, and embed dynamic asset URLs in your web page to deliver various versions of the original asset. The dynamic URLs include instructions on how to transform the asset before delivery.

The first time a transformed asset is requested via a dynamic delivery URL:

  1. The asset is requested by the user's browser.
  2. The asset request reaches the closest CDN edge server.
  3. The CDN edge servers checks if the asset is cached - it is not.
  4. The CDN edge server requests the asset from Cloudinary.
  5. Cloudinary generates the transformed asset as per the dynamic URL instructions.
  6. Cloudinary returns the asset to the CDN edge server.
  7. The CDN edge server caches the image and then returns the image to the user's browser.

Subsequent requests for the transformed asset via the same dynamic delivery URL:

  1. The asset is requested by the user's browser.
  2. The asset request reaches the closest CDN edge server.
  3. The CDN edge servers checks if the asset is cached - it is.
  4. The CDN edge server returns the image to the user's browser.

cloud architecture

For a complete reference of possible transformations see the Transformation URL API Reference.

Scaling

Cloudinary's architecture was built from the ground up to support high load and handle a practically unlimited amount of assets and usage. Cloudinary's service includes a multitude of powerful cloud-based upload and transformation servers, with each server optimized to handle a very high rate of uploads, downloads, and complex image transformations. Cloudinary's servers also automatically scale to easily manage large traffic peaks with advanced load balancers that are used to distribute the load between all our servers. Finally, an enterprise-grade content delivery network delivers assets quickly and efficiently through thousands of global delivery servers.

Security

Cloudinary's secure and safe cloud-based solution is accessible via secure and authenticated HTTPS APIs, with flexible access key provisioning. Cloudinary's security features include:

  • Automatic backup of assets to a secondary protected location.
  • Complete asset access control.
  • Restricted access to assets based on specific transformations, file types and referral sites via the Security page of the Console Settings.
  • Authenticated image access with signed URLs.
  • Access control with multiple user roles and permissions, leveraging two-factor authentication (2FA), 3rd-party service provider logins (such as Google or GitHub), or SSO. You can set these preferences via the Account Security page of the Cloudinary Console Settings.
    Important
    If you signed up through a third-party login (e.g., Google, GitHub or Heroku), changing your email associated with the third-party login without first resetting your Cloudinary credentials can lead to a loss of access to your Cloudinary account. Before changing your third-party email, be sure to establish direct access to Cloudinary via the My Profile page of the Console Settings.

Storage

Assets uploaded to Cloudinary and all generated assets are safely stored and managed by Cloudinary on high-performance servers that support fast upload and download rates.

By default, Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) is leveraged for asset management and assets are stored in S3 buckets that are privately accessed for writing. These can be shared buckets, dedicated buckets or private buckets.

Google Cloud Storage is also available for primary and/or backup storage. This is a premium feature that requires a special setup. For more information, contact customer support.

APIs

Cloudinary offers several Programmable Media APIs:

  • Upload API - methods for uploading assets, creating new assets such as text images, ZIP files and sprites, and transforming existing assets.
  • Admin API - A secure API with methods for browsing, deleting, and restoring existing assets, and for managing upload presets, upload mappings, and transformations. This API also includes the search method and metadata method.
  • Provisioning API - A secure API that enables account administrators to create and manage their account, product environments, users and user groups programmatically.
  • URL API - a URL-based API for delivering assets. Includes dynamic asset transformations, fetching remote assets, and optimizing delivery of the assets. Asset URLs are dynamically mapped to CDN distributions that forward the requests to Cloudinary servers which generate the transformed asset on-demand and deliver them optimized to users.

URLs and endpoints

The URLs for accessing Cloudinary are based on your cloud name, and you can access your public web assets using dynamic URLs. The full URLs of the images or videos you deliver include various parts including the name of the asset, its version and transformation settings. However, all your delivery URLs use the same base URLs. You can view your base URLs and some sample URLs in the Product Environment Credentials section in the Cloudinary Console.

The base URL will also include your cloud name. For example, if your cloud name is 'demo', the base URLs will be:

  • 'api.cloudinary.com/v1_1/demo/' - the base URL for accessing Cloudinary's secure API.
  • 'https://res.cloudinary.com/demo/' - the base URL for Cloudinary's shared CDN Distribution (all Plans).
  • 'https://demo-res.cloudinary.com/' - the base URL for a private CDN Distribution (Advanced plans and higher only).

Building full URLs for accessing your assets is done automatically if you are using our SDKs. However, you can also build these URLs manually. For example, if your cloud name is 'demo' and you want to deliver the uploaded 'sample.jpg' file, simply point to:

example dynamic URL

This means that in your HTML code you can simply add the following tag:

For more information and details on constructing dynamic URLs see Delivering images using dynamic URLs.

Granular access key permissions for Upload and Admin APIs

You may want to allow certain developers to run specific endpoints in the Admin and Upload APIs and their equivalent SDK methods, and deny them from running others. You can coordinate with a Cloudinary solutions engineer to customize multiple access keys (API key/secret pairs) for your product environment, with each pair allowing access to different endpoints or groups of endpoints. You can then assign each customized access key pair to different developers to control who can perform which programmatic actions in your product environment.

For example, you might want to allow certain developers to:

  • Use only GET methods, i.e., read-only permissions.
  • Use only the transformations, upload_presets and streaming_profiles endpoints, with both read and write capabilities.
  • Use all endpoints except DELETE methods.

If a user makes a call to an endpoint that's restricted by the API key, an error message stating that the provided API key doesn't have permission to run the API call is returned.

Note
Cloudinary customers on a paid plan can contact support to enable this feature.

To set up granular permissions for your API keys:

  1. Create all the API keys you want to customize from the Access Keys page of the Cloudinary Console Settings.

    The API key and secret of the first access key in your product environment are displayed in the Product Environment Credentials section on the Dashboard page.

  2. Make a request to Cloudinary support to configure your permissions. When making your request, specify the API keys to update and the list of Upload API and Admin API endpoints you want to restrict for each one. For example, "Please restrict the : GET /streaming_profiles and POST /transformations/:name endpoints for the API key named: front-end-developers."

Cloudinary Console

You can use the web-based Cloudinary Console to administer your Cloudinary account and product environments.

What's a product environment?

A product environment (previously known as a sub-account) is an entity within your account that includes an asset repository, some product environment-specific settings, and other elements that are stored in your product environment and help you manage it, such as upload presets, named transformations, and more.

A product environment can represent a production or staging environment, different organizations, products, or geographic sites that you want to manage separately within a single Cloudinary account.

You can manage the elements related to a product environment via the Cloudinary Console or programmatically using the Admin API.

Note
You can switch between the Programmable Media and Digital Asset Management products using the Product Selector located at the top left of your Console.

This section describes the options available for the Programmable Media product. For details on working with Digital Asset Management, see the Digital Asset Management Overview.

Programmable Media Console

Console Options

The following options are available from the Console Options sidebar, located at the far left of the Console:

Option Description
Open the Product Explorer to learn about Cloudinary's product offerings, including descriptions, feature lists and insights into how each product can significantly enhance your workflow.
Product selector Click the logo for the Cloudinary product you want to work with to display the navigation options for that product.
---
Invite new users Add new users to your account. Learn more.
Help Access a variety of resources to learn more about working with Cloudinary including documentation, get customer support, view the latest release notes for your active product, find training courses, read blog posts, and more.
Settings Manage your personal profile, account-level settings, and product environment-level settings. These settings allow you to control and tweak almost every aspect of your asset pipeline behavior.
Profile avatar Jump to your profile settings, invite friends to sign up for Cloudinary and earn extra credits, or log out of your account.

Programmable Media navigation options

When the Programmable Media product is selected, the following options are available from the Product Navigation menu, divided into several collapsible sections:

Option Description
Product environment selector Enables you to switch between product environments or create a new one.

Note: Free accounts support only one product environment.

---
Getting Started Provides developer onboarding content including quick code snippets to help you configure SDKs, upload assets, deliver transformations, as well as introductory information about other Cloudinary features and resources.
Dashboard View details about your account, product environment, and plan as well as usage status of assets, transformations, storage, bandwidth and add-ons.
Reports Get insights on your assets with usage reports, in-depth analytics and recommendations. For details, see Account usage data.
Manage and Analyze
Media Library A UI for easily browsing and searching through your existing assets, drag & drop upload, and much more. For details, see the DAM user guide.
Media Explorer A UI, specifically for developers, which allows you to browse through your existing assets and see SDK code snippets for actions performed, such as uploading and deleting assets. For details, see Media Explorer.

Note: Some users may additionally have a link from here to jump to the Assets Media Library.

Transform and Customize
Transformation Center Explore and experiment with transformations across a variety of images and videos. Create and save new transformations using the Transformation Builder.
Manage Transformations Edit and manage all your named transformations in the Named Transformations tab, and view a filterable list of all transformations delivered from your product environment in the Log tab.
Optimize and Deliver
Overview Experiment with optimizations in the optimization playground, learn more about how to deliver your images and videos fast while maintaining visual quality, and fine-tune how your images and videos are optimized for delivery.
Video
Overview Offers a user-friendly hub with quick access to resources for embedding the Video Player, implementing video streaming, utilizing analytics, applying edits, and managing videos efficiently.
Analytics Provides insights into the videos you deliver using the Video Player. Explore metrics on total video loads, most-watched videos, and key demographics like top devices, browsers, and countries.
Player Provides direct access to the Video Player Studio, where you can experiment with the Cloudinary Video Player customization options and automatically generate the code to embed your customized player into your site.

Transformation counts

Your account's monthly pricing plan is in part dependent on the total number of transformations performed during a 30-day cycle. Transformation counts are impacted by each processing of an asset. For details, see How are transformations counted?.

Additional resources

✔️ Feedback sent!

Rate this page: