> it will be cheaper to rewrite the software for the render pipeline.
You don't even have to rewrite it, Linux imagemagick + OpenCV can handle the use cases of cropping and sizing trivially. They can keep the rest of the code (device mappings and CDN related I guess) unless that was implemented using ObjectiveC (this is another thing that I would think is crazy)
Cropping and sizing are just two (common) operations that imgix can perform. There's a lot of other stuff as well: http://www.imgix.com/docs/reference
Not to say that it's totally impossible to do these types of operations on ImageMagick, but it wouldn't work nearly as well as our current solution does. ImageMagick is a shockingly awful tool for use in server-land for a variety of reasons, some of which are handled better in GraphicsMagick. IM was the bane of my existence at more than one previous company.
You don't even have to rewrite it, Linux imagemagick + OpenCV can handle the use cases of cropping and sizing trivially. They can keep the rest of the code (device mappings and CDN related I guess) unless that was implemented using ObjectiveC (this is another thing that I would think is crazy)