Why We Abandoned Cloud Storage for Local WebP Pipelines

Cloud storage vendors charge for storage, ingress, egress, transformation compute, and monthly minimums. For an independent publication, provisioning cloud buckets introduces unnecessary API keys and network failure points.

Local Sharp Transformation Pipeline

Using Sharp in Node.js, we process uploaded JPEG and PNG images directly on the server:

const webpBuffer = await sharp(buffer)
  .webp({ quality: 85 })
  .toBuffer();

Images are stored in /public/uploads/YYYY/MM/ with SHA-256 content hashes. The browser requests them directly over HTTP, eliminating cloud egress costs and external downtime.

Architecture & System Visual

Figure 1: Local Sharp Transformation Pipeline. Rendered and served directly from local WebP storage.