Cloudinary Replacement Service for FedRAMP Compliance

As a Senior Software Engineer at eSkillz, I was responsible for working on initiatives aimed at enabling FedRAMP compliance for a partner workforce development software. This involved securing software vulnerabilities, upgrading frameworks, reducing reliance on non-compliant third party dependencies, and in some cases, major rewrites and refactors of the codebase. One such project was the replacement of Cloudinary which was used to manage image, video and audio assets with an in-house solution that would have much of the same features and functionalities. Cloudinary is a robust and market-leading media asset management platform, which would make this a challenging but also interesting project to work on.

I joined the effort as part of the engineering team responsible for designing and implementing the new solution. Over the course of several months, we built an internal media asset management service that supported many of the same capabilities offered by Cloudinary. The service handled storage and delivery for various media formats, implemented compression and format conversion, and supported image transformation features such as resizing and cropping.

During the development process, there were various challenges that were encountered. Performant compression and handling of GIF assets proved to be interesting problems that required deep investigation and experimentation. Logic was fine-tuned in order to strike a balance between performance, file size and asset quality. One of our most interesting solutions was image smart cropping which could identify important objects in an image using deep learning libraries for object detection. I personally learned a lot about media asset storage and handling during the course of this project.

This project required close collaboration across the engineering team and resulted in a successful migration to the new service. The company now had a feature-rich replacement for one of its largest external dependencies and was capable of meeting its compliance goals. This was one of the more rewarding projects I have worked on because it combined large-scale system design and practical engineering problem-solving with a clear business and compliance impact.