Before we wade into adding dependencies for external services and APIs in application, let's start with understanding how to implement the basics of a feature without any external dependencies. It's always worth considering the trade-offs involved in building your own solution to a problem versus leveraging an external cloud service to assist.

File uploading is a very common feature in web applications. From documents to images, files that need to be transferred from a user's desktop to any web service have to go through a multipart/form-data file upload. In this recipe, we will add a backend API to upload images to our Express application, which we could then use to add a cover image to our blog posts.