Offloading image handling from our back-end web server's filesystem has many advantages. From a performance perspective, not having to rely on the bandwidth, memory, and raw disk I/O for all the image operations originating from a single web server is much more scalable. Another big advantage is that your web server's environment can be treated as disposable, because the important resources can be persisted in a separate service. This makes the complexities of deploying web applications much more straightforward, as there isn't any need to migrate content across deployment environments. Images and other large files can quickly become difficult to manage without a dedicated service of some sort.

There are many different services that allow you to upload images to the cloud. They range in terms of services, complexity, pricing, and support for different frameworks. Cloudinary provides a nice middle ground in terms of these concerns. Although other services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) may be very popular, they also require considerably more setup and expertise to configure than a dedicated image management platform such as Cloudinary. We will use Cloudinary to upload our images to a dedicated cloud storage service separate from our Express web server.