With the release of Tachyon version 3, we’ve not only enhanced its capabilities but also streamlined its integration for enterprise WordPress users. Human Made CTO Joe Hoyle takes us through the key updates and how they can benefit your business.
Tachyon is an innovative, on-demand image resizing and optimisation microservice, designed to enhance your digital experience.
Developed with Node.js and leveraging the powerful libvips library through the sharp open source project, Tachyon delivers both efficiency and performance.
As a testament to our commitment to the open source community, Tachyon is freely available, encouraging contributions and improvements from developers worldwide.
Primarily engineered to operate seamlessly with AWS Lambda and attached to an Amazon S3 bucket for source images, Tachyon ensures your images are stored, managed, and delivered with unparalleled speed and quality.
We’ve recently released the next major version of Tachyon, version 3, with some major refactoring and improvements.
What’s new in Tachyon version 3?
TypeScript
The migration of our codebase to TypeScript marks a significant milestone. This shift not only reduces potential bugs but also simplifies the integration process with AWS Lambda. By adopting TypeScript, we’ve eliminated the guesswork in connecting various components, ensuring a more robust and reliable service. The use of the aws-lambda NPM package further enhances this reliability, providing precise runtime types and reducing the likelihood of errors.
In fact, in the transition to TypeScript we discovered several subtle inconsistencies with implicit type coercing that we had to codify in the TypeScript version to maintain backwards compatibility.
The aws-lambda NPM package is a very useful dependency to provide the Lambda runtime types. This is especially useful as AWS Lambda has several schema formats for payloads, which makes it overly easy to introduce errors and bugs.
Upgrade to Node.js 18
Keeping pace with technological advancements, we’ve upgraded Tachyon to Node.js 18. This upgrade means you can expect faster runtime speeds, improved memory usage, and a host of other benefits. Our roadmap includes an upcoming transition to Node.js 20, promising even more enhancements.
Animated GIF support
A long-awaited feature, Tachyon now supports the resizing and optimisation of animated GIFs. This breakthrough allows for the dynamic handling of GIFs, overcoming the previous 5MB size limitation and delivering optimised images without compromising on quality.
In the past, we’ve essentially proxied requests for animated gifs to the original file— not actually resizing or optimising anything for those requests. This also meant a hard-limit of 5MB for GIF images, due to how responses from AWS API Gateway processed. We’re excited to announce Tachyon 3 can resize and optimise animated GIF images just like any other image.
Original
Resized
Simplified AWS Infrastructure
We’ve simplified the AWS architecture of Tachyon to use Lambda Function URLs instead of the proxying the API Gateway service, vastly reducing the infrastructure complexity.
Deploying Tachyon on AWS Lambda now just requires the pre-build ZIP be uploaded to a Lambda Function. Therefore, we have also removed the provided AWS CloudFormation template from the repository and instead recommend using your own IaC (Infrastructure as Code) solution (or not at all, as the case may be).
We’ve also switched the response mechanism in Tachyon to use Lambda Response Streaming. This means faster TTFB (Time to First Byte) response times, and increases the maximum data size from 5MB to 20MB.
Not stopping there, we’ve also added a better automated testing suite powered by Jest, and now make use of AWS SAM for local development and testing.
The Altis Cloud Integration
Tachyon v3 is now a standard feature within the Altis Cloud platform, offering our customers an even more seamless and integrated digital experience. This integration underscores our commitment to providing cutting-edge technology solutions that drive business success.
Why choose Tachyon?
Choosing Tachyon means opting for a solution that ensures your images are always delivered at the highest quality, with minimal load times. Whether you’re an enterprise WordPress user or a developer looking for an efficient image optimisation service, Tachyon offers the flexibility, performance, and scalability your business needs.