Samenvatting

Back in 2013 Maxxton started using Cloudinary as the Content Delivery Network (CDN) for images on websites of their clients. Over time Cloudinary expanded into a large company with over three hundred employees. They introduced many new features that were irrelevant to Maxxton, while they increased costs for the core functionality.
Consequently, Maxxton started exploring alternative solutions. Cloudinary is capable of handling over 40TB in bandwidth and applying over 200,000 transformations to images every month. However, this costs Maxxton about 50,000
euros every year (Hermans, 2023).

The main question of this project is: “How can a cost effective and scalable high performance CDN with on-the-fly transformations be implemented using open-source solutions in Google Cloud?”.
The sub-questions are:
1. What essential functionalities are required to replace Cloudinary?
2. What is required to integrate the selected open-source tools into Maxxton’s Google Cloud environment?
3. Which infrastructure components on the Google Cloud Platform contribute to a cost-effective and scalable image processing solution?
4. What security measures are required to protect user data in the alternative solution?
5. How can potential performance bottlenecks be identified?

The goal of the project is to develop an open-source alternative to Cloudinary that operates within Maxxton’s Google Cloud environment. It must save costs compared to Cloudinary.