5 Infrastructure Pitfalls to Avoid in Ingestion Stack Building

When you need to compile and share large amounts of content, coming from multiple sources in varied formats, you want a solution that makes it easy.

When you’re developing an ingestion stack to control all that content, it’s critical to use the right resources. Every minute an app developer spends building an ingestion stack is time not spent on building and launching other valuable features.

You also need an ingestion stack solution that lets you get you to market rapidly – ahead of your competitors.

Filestack, the leading provider of file handling solutions, helps app developers with key tasks with innovative tools designed to:

• Manage workflows
• Convert and optimize images and file
• Deliver content reliably, quickly and securely
• Use machine learning and automation to organize images and streamline processes
• Provide business insights via detailed analytics

Filestack provides end-to-end content processing, offering everything from secure file uploads and image/audio/video file transformations to optical character recognition and virus detection. 

 

Building Your Ingestion Stack

Your ingestion stack drives your business success. That means having the infrastructure and software to support content ingestion, transformation and delivery. It needs to bring simplicity to the complexities of managing millions of files.

When you consider the many components of an ingestion stack, you get a sense of the importance of a build that optimizes the many elements and complications, including:

• Large file upload(s) size
• Mobile network congestion
• Networks with high latency rates
• Management of multiple file types
• Integration with multiple cloud providers
• Security and authentication

Each of these components add more complexity. That’s why so many companies use Filestack as the core infrastructure for their app development and deployment.

Managing large amounts of content requires consistency and speed using a platform to manage content workflows. These workflows are the pipeline of content tasks that need to be executed to meet the application’s requirements. While steps may be different for each app, some of the most common workflow components include:

1. Access and ingestion of content
2. Filtering
3. Moderation
4. Categorization
5. Editorial review
6. Transformation from one form to another
7. Security verification, including anti-virus and anti-malware detection and quarantining
8. Optimization for size, performance and multiple devices

 

Overcoming Challenges to Stack Building

When building your ingestion stack, here are 5 pitfalls you may face that can derail your content delivery.

1. Lack of Scalability

As your app grows in popularity, the old ways of doing work are often unmanageable. You need workflows that can manage both the growing number of users and an increasing amount of content to be processed as user volume climbs. 

Content is invaluable today. However, it comes in many different forms from multiple platforms, applications and devices. 

One solution is to use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology that automates data extraction and the conversion of content. While many of us have had unsatisfying experiences in the past with OCR, there have been considerable technological advances in recent years.

Today, OCR delivers a scalable upload solution, using machine learning, checks and balances, and incorporated business rules to convert information accurately and deliver it to the application cleanly.

2. Unresponsive Images

Your content is going to be seen in multiple browsers on various types of desktop and mobile devices. You need to deliver images across formats in such a way as to optimize page loads (an important consideration in search engine results). A failure to load images properly and quickly results in viewers losing patience and your site losing opportunities.

The workflow tool you use needs to be able to deliver responsive images efficiently on desktops, tablets or smartphones. The challenge is that rendering requirements are different. A higher-resolution, high-quality image that displays well on a desktop computer will slow down a smaller device, which does not need such detail. 

Filestack’s API makes it much easier to optimize image performance with responsive images across devices with no effort.

3. Inability to Adapt to Changing Networks

Your content will come from multiple sources over varied networks. Mobile networks are often problematic, with notoriously high latency rates, high packet loss and congestion. Filestack eliminates those issues with a solution that:

• Understands network connectivity at the source of the content and customizes the upload/ingest process to accommodate any network connection deficiencies
• Detects network failures and resumes uploads seamlessly
• Identifies the optimal, shortest route on the Internet to circumvent network latency and congestion

The Filestack Intelligent Ingestion tool identifies network conditions, device types and browsers. Automated functions ensure that the file is uploaded successfully. The FII also compensates for faulty hardware, low bandwidth conditions, or situations where there are a large number of users consuming bandwidth simultaneously (e.g. in hotels, on trains or at coffee shops).

4. Insecure File Uploads

Keeping your data safe while in transit or at rest is essential to you and your customers. Filestack file upload security solutions ensure that data is protected at every point in the content journey. Our virus protection tools screen individual files for viruses, malware and other potentially malicious or rogue programs. 

Without these protections, you’re at risk of infecting your apps with nasty programs that are difficult to remove. That means downtime that your company cannot afford. You risk damaging your brand’s reputation and losing customers. If the malware results in a data breach, the economic and reputational damage can be irreversible.

Using a secure file upload solution also helps you avoid attacks that can detail your app, including:

• Metadata attacks that trick an app into copying a file to an unexpected location, potentially overwriting an important file and causing issues
• Size attacks, where large files cause an app to overload or fail
• Content attacks that manipulate the app’s behavior
• Access attacks that change the access rules in the corrupted file are manipulated to allow for unauthorized acts

Filestack security measures also provide the following:

• Data encryption for files in transit and at rest
• Encoding that confuses attacking vectors
• Upload and download protection
• Domain whitelisting

5. Manual Content Management

Your content could conceivably be moderated, filtered and converted using manual processes. However, such processes are very time and labor intensive. Using employees for content curation is not a very scalable option.

Consider that human data entry clerks can process about 20 pages of text per hour with a 96 percent accuracy rate. Compare that to advanced OCR technology, which can process 20 pages of text in seconds at a 98 percent accuracy rate. 

Content automation tools that provide more accurate information faster let you deliver in-demand content sooner.

Filestack helps your developers create content ingestion stacks that scale, are efficient, remain protected and are responsive to user devices. To learn more about how Filestack can help your app development team deliver with a scalable ingestion stack, sign up for free today.