Resize at the edge, not the origin

Resize at the edge, not the origin
A Nairobi marketplace generated 6 thumbnail sizes per product on their origin server, believing pre-baking everything was the performant move. The image worker queue backed up for hours on every catalog import.
The myth: pre-generate all sizes upstream. The reality: 90% of those variants were never requested, and storage ballooned to 400GB.
What we changed: we served one master image and let the CDN's image engine resize, crop, and convert to WebP on demand at the edge, caching each variant after first hit.
Result: storage shrank to 41GB, import jobs finished in minutes, and Nairobi image LCP dropped from 2.8s to 900ms thanks to right-sized WebP.
Let the edge make variants on demand. Most sizes you'd pre-bake, nobody asks for.
The number that mattered: 41GB storage, down from 400GB.