Processing medical images at scale on the cloud
&gt; But as it turns out, we can’t use it.<p>Although it has Python bindings, OpenSlide is implemented in C and reads files using standard OS file handlers, however our data sits on cloud storage that is accessible via HTTP.<p>This is a self-inflicted problem.  Very typical of people who don&#x27;t know how storage works &#x2F; what functionality is available will often push themselves into an imaginary corner.<p>Why of all things use HTTP for this?<p>No, of course you don&#x27;t need to download the whole file to read it.<p>&quot;standard OS file handlers&quot; -- this is a strong indicator that the person writing this doesn&#x27;t understand how their OS works.  What standard are we talking about?  Even if &quot;standard&quot; here is used to mean &quot;some common way&quot; -- then which one?  How the files are opened?  And so on.  The author didn&#x27;t research the subject at all, and came up with an awful solution (vendor lock-in) as a result.