PicsArt

The largest mobile image editing application optimizes and protects the platform with Cloudflare.

PicsArt is the largest mobile photo editing application with over 90 million active users and over 200 million images uploaded every month. “With so many users, we create billions of impressions for our brand partners with uniquely active engagement activities that separates our platform from other media companies,” explained PicsArt Chief Technology Officer Mikayel Vardanyan.

PicsArt's Challenge: Editing and Serving Millions of Images around the world

While PicsArt succeeds in offering their users great features and content, delivering these images to a global user base becomes a technical challenge at PicsArt's scale. “We have a huge amount of content, especially images, being created and shared to millions of people around the world with PicsArt,” Vardanyan related. As PicsArt grew and expanded, serving content from a single location could mean slow delivery and congested infrastructure, which would result in a poor experience for PicsArt's users. With that in mind, PicsArt set out to find a solution before it became an issue.

PicsArt's Solution: Content Distribution with Built-in Optimization and Protection

PicsArt knew that a Content Distribution Network (CDN) would solve their challenge and allow for seamless growth going forwards. Cloudflare's CDN now caches and serves PicsArt's content from data servers in over 330 cities around the world reducing geographic latency for PicsArt's global users, while also saving PicsArt Bandwidth. “With Cloudflare's CDN the load time of our images improved by 2-3x and on top of that we’re saving over 50% on our monthly bandwidth usage,” noted Vardanyan.

“With Cloudflare's CDN the load time of our images improved by 2-3x and on top of that we're saving over 50% on our monthly bandwidth usage”

Though PicsArt was only searching for a performance partner, they also saw the benefits of enlisting Cloudflare's security and protection. “In the last month Cloudflare blocked over 675 million threats aimed at our infrastructure,” Vardanyan explained. Cloudflare's protection is multi-fold: the Web Application Firewall (WAF) leverages collective security intelligence from millions of Internet properties on the network to protect PicsArt from the latest known vulnerabilities and malicious actors. Furthermore, Cloudflare's DDoS mitigation is designed to allow normal traffic to freely flow, while blocking and absorbing malicious traffic at Cloudflare's edge. This allows PicsArt to stay online and functioning for their users, even in the case of a massive online attack.

Vardanyan concluded: “We chose Cloudflare because they are the best CDN provider for our business and scaling needs, with continuous innovation, new services and great support.”