Brandfolder's Enhanced Content Management and Distribution with Fastly

Brandfolder is a leading digital asset management platform that serves over 5,000 companies, including renowned brands like Angi, Ibotta, and Stripe. The platform provides a secure, visually elegant location for businesses to organize, store, and distribute their brand’s assets. These assets can range from logos and color palettes to images, ads, and videos. One of Brandfolder's key features is the Smart CDN, which allows users to implement content changes across their websites instantly, convert file formats on the fly, and manage asset usage rights automatically. The company is continuously evolving its architecture and rolling out upgrades and new features to enhance its services.

Brandfolder, a digital asset management platform, was facing challenges with its content dissemination feature, the Smart CDN. The company was initially performing eager image transformations, which involved creating different renditions of an image as soon as it was ingested. While this approach could potentially speed up request response times, it significantly increased the ingest time, causing delays for customers. Another challenge was the process of adding watermarks to images. Each image was individually watermarked by Brandfolder and stored until it needed to be served. This process was not only time-consuming but also increased storage costs. Furthermore, the company was looking to update their thumbnailing process, which involved generating thumbnails for all assets in their system. The existing process was creating bottlenecks and hindering scalability.

Brandfolder partnered with Fastly to enhance its content management and distribution capabilities. Fastly's edge cloud platform was used to offload image transformation, which eliminated the delay at ingestion by converting images on demand. This allowed 95% of JPEG and PNG images to be processed in fewer than 5 seconds, including full image optimization, resizing overlays, and thumbnail creation. Fastly's Image Optimizer was also used to generate watermarks on-demand, which significantly reduced storage costs. Fastly's surrogate key purge feature was used to instantly distribute updated content across multiple servers. Brandfolder also leveraged Fastly's developer tools and integrations to facilitate production. For instance, all new Brandfolder services were automatically going through Terraform, which allowed developers to deploy changes in a staging environment, test them, and then migrate them into production consistently. Fastly Fiddle was used to experiment with code on the Fastly platform, which helped in rearchitecting the thumbnailing service.

• The partnership with Fastly has significantly improved Brandfolder's operational efficiency and user experience. The on-demand image transformation and watermark generation have not only reduced latency but also saved on storage costs. The surrogate key purge feature has enabled easier content management by allowing Brandfolder to instantly distribute updated content across multiple servers. The use of Fastly's developer tools and integrations has facilitated consistent and efficient production. The rearchitecting of the thumbnailing service has saved users a substantial amount of time and improved scalability. As Brandfolder continues to evolve its architecture and roll out new features, it is increasingly relying on Fastly to optimize its user experience.

• 95% of JPEG and PNG images are processed in fewer than 5 seconds, including full image optimization, resizing overlays, and thumbnail creation.
• Fastly's edge cloud platform eliminated the delay at ingestion by converting images on demand.
• Fastly's Image Optimizer reduced storage costs by generating watermarks on-demand.