Why we chose Uploadcare to manage uploads

[djaiss]

I know that many people will ask this question.

Going to an external service to manage files was a tough decision to make. When we build a product ourselves, it's only natural to do everything ourselves. Including file uploads.

However, upload is not a trivial thing to do. You can upload files, images, avatars. A file is pretty straightforward. You upload it and you have nothing else to do. An image is trickier. You upload it, then you want to manipulate it someone. Get various sizes. So you end up writing some code to resize the image. Then you install GD and ImageMagik. Then you require it in the Docker image file as well because it should work. Then, once you deploy to production, you need some kind of CDN to make sure images load fast and efficiently.

Our core value as a product, is not to manipulate files. Our core value is the management of employees. We need to move as fast as possible in this direction, so we can finally ship the first version of OfficeLife to the public. If we want to deal with files, it's at least two months of work, easily, to make everything work (considering that this is a side project, and we already work on it at least 20 hours per week).

Ultimately, yes, I'd like to store and manipulate files ourselves. But if we want to ship something fast, going through an external service is the right thing to do. It allowed me to implement the management of avatar in less than a week - including the manipulation of all the images. Uploadcare has a generous free plan for people who don't want to pay anything, and is somehow cheap for a company if the company is serious about using OfficeLife in an environment they host themselves.

[evrardjp]

For some companies it will not be about the money, but about the compliance. Storing data outside their datacenter/control isn't possible. For those, disabling the upload feature is probably better.

Side note: For uploads, just an idea... maybe browser-based upload to s3 buckets? It would allow the self-hosted ceph...

[meichthys]

For future reference, I think Nextcloud File-Drop may offer the needed functionality to be a self-hosted alternative.