Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been dominating the cloud computing market for several years now. It was one of the pioneers in cloud computing, and because of its quality offerings, it has earned a solid reputation. In a market that was previously dominated by AWS, we have seen many new entrants over recent years. They have not only weakened the position that AWS had and given customers more options but they have been built specifically to meet the new demands of consumers bearing their particular problems in mind. While AWS is still great, it is no longer the best choice for many users, especially when there are so many other services that can do the job more efficiently and at a lower cost.
Amazon’s cloud storage solution named Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is one of the most commonly used cloud storage services for app developers and general users alike. Whether you need to store audio, video, text, or nearly any other kind of file, S3 can do the job. It’s native to the Amazon ecosystem so there is nothing else that integrates quite as quickly or smoothly as S3 in that environment. It’s been around quite a while and has developed a solid reputation in tech circles as being a reliable and high-quality service. However, it is not the ideal solution for every kind of user.
First of all, it’s expensive. The average storage cost of S3 is not that high, but the bandwidth charges can be extremely expensive depending on what you are storing and how you are accessing it. Secondly, it is a solution designed for experts and also for people that want to make the most use of the Amazon environment through the S3 interface. This makes using S3 rather complicated and the interface will have a lot of features that you might never even use. Lastly, even though it is a great service, it might not be the best choice for you if you need something very specific that S3 doesn’t specialize in.
What Is Cloud?
For many people, especially small to medium scale businesses, S3 is going to be overkill. With limited amounts of data and only a small number of people to deal with, there is no need to get such a robust solution, but there is a need to keep things on the cloud. In order to appreciate the effectiveness of Upload.io, it would help to understand why a cloud-based solution is best for you even though you have access to cheaper alternatives.
Cloud computing involves getting access to resources such as applications, data storage, servers, networking applications, development tools, or any other kind of computing resource whenever you need it. Generally, access to the cloud is through the internet. For instance, when you are listening to a podcast, you are accessing information that is stored somewhere on a server or in some kind of storage. You aren’t downloading this information onto your own device, you are accessing the cloud. You might also have the option of downloading information from the cloud, but in most cases will just be accessing this information. As the needs of businesses change, more kinds of resources are being added to respective clouds and this technology is becoming increasingly important in all kinds of operations.
Why Cloud Is Important
The cloud is always available through the internet and this accessibility is a huge factor in helping people collaborate more efficiently. In the past, you would have to send someone a hard copy or at the very least you would have to email an attachment. Then they would download it, work on it, re-upload it, then you would receive it, re-download it, and the process continues. With cloud computing, everything is in one place and anyone who has access rights to that file and an internet connection can access that information. If you uploaded something to the cloud and your partner is in a different country, all they need is the key. They can log in, make the changes to the file, and sign out. You can log in, see what happened, make changes or download the file or send it to whoever needs it.
Things are also much safer on the cloud from both physical threats and digital ones. If you have a file saved on your local computer or your local server or on an external hard disk in the office, if anything goes wrong with that system, your data is gone. If this is critical data, for instance, your financial information for the past twenty years or critical data of clients and vendors, you don’t want this to be at risk of theft, damage, loss, or data corruption. Cloud computing removes all of this risk and also reduces the chances of something being accidentally deleted or misplaced. In most cases, there will be multiple copies of your information on the cloud so you can rest assured that you will always have something to fall back on.
Another big problem for users is the capacity of their storage solutions. When you had started your business or your work as a professional you may have just needed 500GB or 1TB of space. As you scale upwards, especially in things like developing data lakes or data analysis or even storing the information from your website, you start to rack up quite a bit of data and end up with not enough room to store it. You do have the option of buying more physical memory and then adding that to your system, but that comes with the added cost of having to make all those configurations and bearing all the inefficiencies that come with managing that kind of storage. With cloud solutions, you can buy as much memory as you need, and you can also scale back down if you don’t need all that memory anymore.
Lastly, as businesses grow, their investment in the digital infrastructure they use can also grow exponentially. As technology changes, you don’t have to worry about upgrading your entire infrastructure because you are limited by a single obstacle such as data storage capacity or speed. With cloud storage you know you are always getting the best storage possible because the cloud provider is constantly updating their infrastructure to give the best possible service.
What Is API?
API stands for Application Processing Interface and it is a mechanism through which different software and different applications can interact and exchange data. Most applications are designed to either operate on their own or to work in harmony with some specified other applications. With an API you can get applications that weren’t designed to work with each other to do just that.
Why Do I Need Application Interaction?
According to recent research, modern businesses are using a plethora of cloud-based applications to help them in their processes, on average this is more than one thousand applications. Most of these applications are coming from different developers and aren’t designed to work in harmony even though their functionality complements one another. With better communication between the applications, you will notice much better performance within each application, better communication throughout the organization, better connectivity with other stakeholders such as vendors, and more efficiency in the overall operations.
Imagine if your email didn’t send you notifications and you had to manually go through a process just to see if you had a new email. API will connect the service that gives you notifications to the email inbox to automatically notify you when you receive any new mail.
In the same way, you can change the customers’ experience by incorporating APIs and improving the user experience. Your employees will have a much better user experience, and so will your vendors and all other stakeholders. As a manager or owner, you will have far more insight into the operations and you will be gathering a lot more data that can further be used to optimize operations.
How Will It Help File Processing?
Whether you are working with text, images, audio, or any other kind of file, you can use APIs to improve the way these files are processed. Operations such as uploading, storing, hosting, transforming, and general processing can take a lot of time when you have big files or a large number of files to work with. This is where file upload API comes into play; it helps you to improve file processing between different applications. For instance, if you are using the same files in a few different operations, you won’t have to bring your workflow to a halt because the file is being uploaded or moved by someone else. Everyone has direct access to the file and they can use it whenever they want.
Secondly, you are working with a specialized system that is designed to move mammoth volumes of data without any delay, also known as latency. In any system, the lower the latency, the better the final result. With fast enough latency you, along with other users, will see things being done in real-time because the delay will be so close to zero.
How Will Upload.io Operate?
Uploads
One of the most important tasks for an application, a website, or any other kind of infrastructure is to be able to upload data. To do this the Upload.io API will launch a simple POST request to get the information forwarded to the cloud storage that you have in place. Not only is this an extremely quick way to upload data, but it is quite difficult to get it wrong. This makes the process that much more secure against human error.
Transforming, Converting, Optimizing
The next step is to ensure that the uploaded data is in the best possible state for it to be further processed. This involves transforming the files, converting them into the required format, and optimizing their condition to work in the best possible way. When you are using Upload.io, this is a very easy process since it can all be done directly from the URL. This is a standard part of Upload.io, and if you want to make changes you can simply add a transformation slug to the URL. This way you can make changes whenever you need to, to whatever file you want to adjust, and it can be done within a matter of seconds.
Content Delivery
Your content is online, you have even gone ahead and optimized it for mobile use, but you need to get it to the people that need it the most. This is where content delivery comes into play. For this, you need a delivery system that is physically located in different parts of the world to get data transferred at the best possible speeds. Upload.io has a global network of more than 300 locations that assist in the content delivery process. If all the servers are in one place, you are limited by physical distance in how efficiently you can get data from one part of the world to the other. With the distribution system that Upload.io has, no part of the world is too far away.
Pricing
Not only is Upload.io very competitively priced, but it also gives users the ability to create their own packages. There are three premade packages that you can choose from and the smallest package starts from a comfortable $7 per month. If you have specific requirements you can always go ahead and create your own package by discussing your needs with the sales team to see how they can best accommodate your requirements.
Free Trial
If you want to risk no money at all, avoid sharing your credit card information, and still get a taste of what Upload.io has to offer, there is a free trial that you can avail. A lot of companies will make credit card information mandatory so that when the trial period ends they can automatically bill you for the next month. Upload.io gives you a very generous period of 14 full days to try out their service and see how it compares to what you are already using – and there are no strings attached. If you feel like you don’t want to continue after the trial period you can simply opt out of the program and that will end your membership.
You can try all the features and see how it all works, and if at the end of the trial, or even during the trial, you want to sign up, you can then share your credit card information. From that point on you will be on a paid membership with the option to make changes to your package, whether you want to scale up or down, at any time.
0 Comments