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We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

engineering.nanit.com

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Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#91

Post by chrismorgan »

varenc wrote: post #59

In HN style, I'm going to diverge from the content and rant about the company: Nanit needs this storage because they run cloud based baby cameras. Every Nanit user is uploading video and audio of their home/baby live to Nanit without any E2EE. It's a hot mic sending anything you say near it to the cloud. Their hardware essentially requires a subscription to use, even though it costs $200/camera. You must spend an add…

> Every Nanit user is uploading video and audio of their home/baby live to Nanit without any E2EE. It's a hot mic sending anything you say near it to the cloud.

Your way of phrasing it makes it sound like it would be fine to upload the video if it were end-to-end-encrypted. I think this is worth clarifying (since many don’t really understand the E2EE trade-off): E2EE is for smart clients that do all the processing, plus dumb servers that are only used for blind routing and storage. In this instance, it sounds like Nanit aren’t doing any routing or (persistent) storage: the sole purpose of the upload is offloading processing to the cloud. Given that, you can have transport encryption (typically TLS), but end-to-end encryption is not possible.

If you wanted the same functionality with end-to-end encryption, you’d need to do the video analysis locally, and upload the results, instead of uploading the entire video. This would presumably require more powerful hardware, or some way of offloading that to a nominated computer or phone.

Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#92

Post by hinkley »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #73
hinkley wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're going to run a production system with a bus number of 1? I think you mean a small fraction of 3 engineers. And small fractions aren't that small.

The cost being a fraction of 1 does not imply it's one person. 3 people each spending 2 weeks a year on the service is still a fraction of 1.

It is three opportunity costs. No free lunches.

Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#93

Post by sokoloff »

unethical_ban wrote: post #89
cbg0 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Self-hosted video isn't that hard Self-hosting video is not something the typical user of a baby monitor would ever even consider.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I'm not leaving a baby at home while I go on vacation. I would never be on another network, even. Why need the cloud?

Because it’s easy and convenient for new parents.

The typical parent has never heard of Synology or Ubiquiti, doesn’t have a NAS, and gets whatever tech their ISP gave/rents them.

Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#95

Post by gblargg »

cbg0 wrote: post #82
varenc wrote: post #59

In HN style, I'm going to diverge from the content and rant about the company: Nanit needs this storage because they run cloud based baby cameras. Every Nanit user is uploading video and audio of their home/baby live to Nanit without any E2EE. It's a hot mic sending anything you say near it to the cloud. Their hardware essentially requires a subscription to use, even though it costs $200/camera. You must spend an add…

> Self-hosted video isn't that hard Self-hosting video is not something the typical user of a baby monitor would ever even consider.

A microSD card in the camera, like most others use?

From the product description though it sounds like sleep analysis is what you're paying for, which they do on servers analyzing the video.

Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#96

Post by chii »

sokoloff wrote: post #93
unethical_ban wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I'm not leaving a baby at home while I go on vacation. I would never be on another network, even. Why need the cloud?

Because it’s easy and convenient for new parents. The typical parent has never heard of Synology or Ubiquiti, doesn’t have a NAS, and gets whatever tech their ISP gave/rents them.

It's more that a typical parent has not thought of the need to have a baby monitor, until they have a baby (in which case, they're too busy to build out their own baby monitor stack).

Pay money to solve a problem and time-save as a parent is a valid business idea/strategy. The externalities that the parents might suffer if these businesses do not completely adhere to good security practices don't seem to come back to bite them (and most parents get lucky and not have any bad consequences - yet).

Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#98

Post by unethical_ban »

sokoloff wrote: post #93
unethical_ban wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I'm not leaving a baby at home while I go on vacation. I would never be on another network, even. Why need the cloud?

Because it’s easy and convenient for new parents. The typical parent has never heard of Synology or Ubiquiti, doesn’t have a NAS, and gets whatever tech their ISP gave/rents them.

There is no technical requirement for an easy-to-use baby monitor to be cloud-connected. If there is no easy-to-use baby monitor which is not cloud-connected, that is a market problem, not a technical problem.

Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#99

Post by Dylan16807 »

hinkley wrote: post #92
xboxnolifes wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost being a fraction of 1 does not imply it's one person. 3 people each spending 2 weeks a year on the service is still a fraction of 1.

It is three opportunity costs. No free lunches.

Nobody implied it was free. Yes there are opportunity costs, and they add up to less than one sysadmin of opportunity.

Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"

#100

Post by BrandoElFollito »

chrismorgan wrote: post #91
varenc wrote: post #59

In HN style, I'm going to diverge from the content and rant about the company: Nanit needs this storage because they run cloud based baby cameras. Every Nanit user is uploading video and audio of their home/baby live to Nanit without any E2EE. It's a hot mic sending anything you say near it to the cloud. Their hardware essentially requires a subscription to use, even though it costs $200/camera. You must spend an add…

> Every Nanit user is uploading video and audio of their home/baby live to Nanit without any E2EE. It's a hot mic sending anything you say near it to the cloud. Your way of phrasing it makes it sound like it would be fine to upload the video if it were end-to-end-encrypted. I think this is worth clarifying (since many don’t really understand the E2EE trade-off): E2EE is for smart clients that do all the processing, p…

In other words, E2EE requires two or more clients, and only on these clients the information is in clear.

In the case of this product, there is only one client (and a server).

E2EE bills then down to having the traffic encrypted like you have with a https website.

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