[swindsor]

We wanted to be able to serve arbitrary sizes so we can handle different demands for thumbnails and new use cases. Having to resize all of your images because you've re-designed your homepage sucks, and is no fun (especially if you have a large set of images).

Cloudfront is really enticing, though. For a cheap CDN, if we really had the need, we'd probably migrate to cloudfront, then come up with a task to batch resize our S3 images, then stick them back into S3. This could probably be done on a one-off task on ec2 by spinning up a few instances, or even with Hadoop.

If anyone's taken this approach, I'd love to see it!