In the last 6 months we have added upgrades to almost every aspect of our product, and we're excited to share a few with you. Everything has been made available without additional charge.

I'll summarize by category and link to relevant posts if you want to know the background stories.

Robot Upgrades

We added a robot for lossless image optimization, a width and delay option to the /html/convert Robot, a density option to the /document/thumbs Robot, svg support and image interlacing.

All these improvements allow us to support more types of media, and do more magical things to it, while keeping the interface for you simple, elegant, and fun to use.

How about converting PDF to animated GIF? Very useful for generating document previews 😄

API Upgrades

You can now manage Templates via our API (add, edit, delete and retrieve a list of Templates), we e-mail encoding failures, we added more secure notifications so you know it's really Transloadit who tells you a video is ready to be served to your visitors. We can automatically retry failures, and we mail you when you're close to your configured limits.

Software Kit Upgrades

Video encoding in PHP was never easier, now that our PHP SDK has been added to Packagist, Travis CI, and now fully supports PHP 5.3, namespaces, and strict mode. Just add transloadit/php-sdk to your project's composer.json and start encoding media!

Our JavaScript plugin now supports jQuery 1.9+ and was refactored to trim away dead weight. We keep older versions online in case your business wants to support Internet Explorer 6.0.

Pricing 'Upgrades'

Our free plan now offers 1 GB total instead of 100 MB monthly. This helps developers try out Transloadit more extensively.

We now also offer annual billing, which allows you to pay for 10 months in advance and receive the credit worth 12 months. There are many more ways to lower your Transloadit bill.

Website Upgrades

We simplified the site design and navigation making it easier to navigate through the site.

The Template JSON is automatically indented for you now - both when creating the Template and when viewing it later - which makes it much easier to create, update and read your encoding Templates.

We have also added real-time support for the Assemblies in your Transloadit account. Just keep the list open and see Assemblies being added in real-time as your visitors upload. The Assembly status also updates as its being processed.

The API documentation has been redacted externally and been made more consistent.

DevOps Upgrades

We said goodbye to our loved ones, locked ourselves in a hotel, and didn't come out until we completely revised the way we write software, test, and deploy it.

We wrap our software and the stack it relies on (40+ encoding programs/libraries) into single containers, and distribute those across our platform. This allows us to do fast deploys and rollbacks, and makes it less hairy to roll out stack upgrades.

Stack Upgrades

Our encoding software is built on Node.js. This allows us to run more encoding jobs in parallel than would be possible/feasible with traditional languages. We've upgraded Node.js to a newer version which gave us a nice drop in response times.

Infrastructure Upgrades

We've invested in adding heavy 'iron' machines to our otherwise cloud-based platform, giving us the best of both worlds: we can still add up to 100 cloud servers in under 5 minutes to deal with traffic spikes, but we also have a powerful base capacity, night and day, ready to encode whatever document / image / audio / video file you throw at it.

We moved our status page away from Amazon completely (with the exception of Route 53). This way we can offer you status updates even when cross-region outages hit EC2 / RDS / EBS / ELB / S3. While we were at it, we enhanced our automated monitoring so we know instantly when something is up.

In Other News

The Transloadit co-founders have started an open source initiative called tus.io which aims to develop an open protocol for resumable uploads, and offer MIT Licensed client/server implementations for most platforms (Android, iOS, jQuery, PHP, Go). Obviously we'll look at ways to incorporate the expertise we hereby gain into Transloadit, so stay tuned for more goodness!

I hope you'll enjoy building even cooler software on top of our improvements as much as we did building these 😄

What should we upgrade next?

Let us know in a comment or tell us at mailto:hello@transloadit.com!

Happy Transloading!