The Brandenburg Gate with fireworks lighting up the sky behind it

2015 has been good to us. Looking at the amount of data we have processed for our customers, it is even our most successful year thus far. As you can see in the graph below, we have processed 1.4 petabyte in 2015 alone. This is roughly as much as all the years before 2015 combined, since our foundation in 2009. We are very proud of that and will do our best to reach a similar growth rate in 2016.

Chart showing Converted Data in Terabytes, with the number growing dramatically each year since 2009.

With that in mind, we have been hard at work in the past year to make considerable improvements to our code, our robots, the performance of our systems and our organization in general.

New & improved Robots

This year, we have added a good deal of new robots to our service, which offer a wide variety of functionalities. If you haven’t already, we would like you to meet them:

  • Stitch together audio files using /audio/concat
  • Repeat an audio fragment using /audio/loop
  • Add watermarks by overlaying audio on audio using /audio/merge
  • Prepend an ad or title-screen to your videos using /video/concat
  • Export to Microsoft Azure's Blob Storage using /azure/store
  • Export to IBM Cloud SoftLayer (or any other OpenStack provider's) Object Storage using /softlayer/store
  • Reject harmful files before they impact your platform using /file/virusscan

In addition to this, we have also added various new features to our existing robots:

  • /video/merge can now generate a video from a number of images
  • /video/encode can now accept – and create – animated GIF files
  • /image/optimize is now able to pick the most efficient optimization strategy automatically and also supports more file formats, like SVG

Finally, all encoding robots can now use our FFmpeg v2.2.3 stack.

Performance upgrades

We are constantly making improvements to the performance of our systems.

Early in 2015, we have made several improvements to our Assembly logic and queue system, after which the average Assembly runs between 20% and 60% faster. If you’d like to know more about this, you can find detailed information in the blog post.

We have teamed up with Amazon to vastly increase our capacity. Being able to quickly add more machines is crucial for processing encoding spikes quickly. Thanks to new custom arrangements with Amazon AWS, we are now able to scale up to 1500 machines at once. For you as a customer, this means faster encoding times and that we can deal with massive HD video imports as if they were just a little avatar.

Behind the scenes

Some of the other upgrades we have made in 2015 aren't immediately noticeable, but will still benefit you in the long run. For example, we have upgraded our operating systems so we can start using containers to do quicker releases of new encoding tools. We remade our continuous integration setup, cutting the time it takes for new code to reach production in half. We got rid of a bulk of old legacy code and are now happily running on Node.js 4, which has been a great reliability improvement over our previous version.

Growing the organization

Apart from upgrades to the strictly technical side of things, we have also strived to make regular improvements to our company as a whole. We have recently refined and published our vision on working at Transloadit. So, if you are interested in joining us, we welcome you to give that a read.

This year we also cooperated with Coursera to complete our first case study and we hope to add several more in the coming year. If you are satisfied with our service and interested in some extra exposure in the form of a detailed write-up of the way Transloadit works for your company, please reach out to us.

Lastly, three new members have been added to the Transloadit team, who will work on improving our user experience. In alphabetical order, they are:

  • A.J. – Writer and Editor
  • Artur – Front-end Developer
  • Harry – Front-end Developer

A.J. will be helping us to improve our communication with the outside world, by polishing the language of our website, blog posts, press releases, etc. Artur and Harry are working hard on developing Uppy, a new open source JavaScript uploader that will replace our current jQuery SDK.

More for less

This year, we have lowered our prices across the board to give you more Transloadit for less money. Additionally, customers who use our Enterprise plan are now able to purchase even bigger encoding pipelines.

Giving back

We wouldn't have a great company if it wasn't for open source. The founders met each other through its community and nearly all software that we use is rooted in open source as well.

For that reason, we are inclined to give back as much as possible and have ramped up our sponsoring of developer conferences, giving away free tickets on Twitter every month. We have also sponsored a few giants on whose shoulders we stand and we are now an official sponsor to ImageMagick, as well as donors to the Free Software Foundation.

Besides through goodies, providing servers, expertise and cash, we like to contribute by sharing our best bits of code as well. Last month, we released tus 1.0 to the world. tus is an open protocol that aims to solve the problem of unreliable file uploads once and for all. It has received contributions from people at Google, Yahoo, Node.js, ZeroMQ and HTTP/1.1. Vimeo is an early adopter and has already announced it will be using tus as its main protocol for uploading. tus will find its way into our complete product offering, as you can read in our New Year’s Resolutions.

New year’s resolutions

Now is of course not only the time to look back upon the highlights of the past year, but also to make resolutions to improve ourselves in the coming year. Here is our list of New Year’s resolutions.

In 2016, we will:

  • Release Uppy, a new JavaScript file uploader for the modern web
  • Integrate tus’ resumable file upload capabilities into all of our services, so no upload will ever again fail
  • Support new encoding and streaming features such as MPEG-Dash

Is there anything else you would like to see us add to our list of resolutions? Just shoot us an email. 😄

That is about everything we would like to share with you for now. All that is left for us to do now, is to give you our heartfelt thanks for making 2015 such an excellent year for us and to wish you an amazing and booming 2016!

If you’d like to receive more regular updates than just this yearly newsletter, you can subscribe to our blog feed or follow us on Twitter.

A happy New Year from the entire team at Transloadit!