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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"

#131

Post by 4gotunameagain »

ramraj07 wrote: post #117
dmje wrote: post #101

I’m sufficiently old / sensible (you decide) to think that uploading video of your baby (to anywhere) is fucking weird and fucking spooky and not needed anyway. This is a solution that doesn’t have a problem. Worse: it prays on parental / young parental fears. There’s nothing here - this is not a product that’s needed. You don’t need to “track” your baby, ffs. You don’t need to watch it while it sleeps. You don’t nee…

Of all the hills to die on w.r.t. how the world is screwed up, this seems like the silliest. Different folks parent differently, culture evolves. You're free to have your "old school" thoughts as are people who use services like this. Its not like they're publishing it in public. The service in discussion especially just stores it in the server only temporarily to use ML to detect things such as sleeping or crying. S…

> Different folks parent differently, culture evolves.

You are framing it as if every change is in a positive direction, which it clearly isn't. Risking at sounding like an old man yelling at clouds, look at the kids these days. They are so dependent, and so sensitive to negative stimuli or emotions.

Parents need to realise that they need to grow adults, not perpetual kids.

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

#132

Post by lbreakjai »

pjjpo wrote: post #55
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do all your comments seem LLM generated? You do clearly have something to contribute, but it’s probably better to just write what you’re talking about than going through a LLM.

I don't know about the commenter specifically but in general, using LLMs to format text is a game changer in the ability for English-as-Second-Language folks to contribute to tech conversations. While I get where some of the bias against anything LLM generated comes from, I would keep it for editorial content and not community comments to be fair to a global audience.

I tried that, but you end up sounding so bland and generic. It feels like the textual equivalent of the Corporate Memphis art style. I'm comfortable doing this at work because I exist outside of slack/emails, but in here I am what I write. If I delegate this to a LLM, then I do not exist anymore.

What I found useful is to use LLMs as a fuzzy near-synonym search engine. "Sad, but with a note of nostalgia", for example. It's a slower process, which in itself isn't bad.

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

#133

Post by Capricorn2481 »

4gotunameagain wrote: post #131
ramraj07 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of all the hills to die on w.r.t. how the world is screwed up, this seems like the silliest. Different folks parent differently, culture evolves. You're free to have your "old school" thoughts as are people who use services like this. Its not like they're publishing it in public. The service in discussion especially just stores it in the server only temporarily to use ML to detect things such as sleeping or crying. S…

> Different folks parent differently, culture evolves. You are framing it as if every change is in a positive direction, which it clearly isn't. Risking at sounding like an old man yelling at clouds, look at the kids these days. They are so dependent, and so sensitive to negative stimuli or emotions. Parents need to realise that they need to grow adults, not perpetual kids.

> look at the kids these days. They are so dependent, and so sensitive to negative stimuli or emotions.

I think many of us have found people writing comments like this are not interacting with children very much. More just reading the takes of others who also don't interact with children.

And if this was a legitimate problem to address, you would not address it by taking away baby monitors.

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

#134

Post by thaumasiotes »

bee_rider wrote: post #116
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…

I actually don’t really get the point of a cloud service for this. Aren’t babies usually left in situations where there’s at least one trusted adult locally available?

Yes, the normal solution to wondering how a baby is doing is to look over at it.

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

#135

Post by hippo22 »

vlovich123 wrote: post #66
sbrother wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a happy customer, I picked nanit because it actually worked. We didn’t even use the “smart” features, but “you can turn on the app from anywhere you happen to be and expect the video feed to work” is unfortunately a bar that no competitor I tried could meet. The others were mostly made by non-software companies with outsourced apps that worked maybe 50% of the time. I wish we could have local-first and e2ee consum…

The vtech camera is working well enough for me for what it’s worth. But any such app solution generally implies transfer through the company’s servers.

It seems possible to establish a p2p connection with the camera where the company servers act as a broker.

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

#136

Post by pcl »

BrandoElFollito wrote: post #100
chrismorgan wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No, this doesn't get at the point of end-to-end encryption. Better to look at it in terms of the parties involved -- E2EE implies that there are two or more parties, and that only some of those parties should have unencrypted access.

In the case in point, the parent (camera owner) is one party and Nanit is another party. (Prior to the work in the linked post, AWS S3 was another party). The goal of E2EE is to deny plaintext access to some of these parties. So, in an E2EE deployment, Nanit (and AWS) would not have unencrypted access to the video content, even though they're storing it.

As chrismorgan pointed out, if Nanit did not have access to the unencrypted data, they could not do server-side video processing.

(Also, FWIW, there are multiple clients in this scenario -- the parents' phones are clients, and need unencrypted access to the video stream.)

(As an aside, where I used to work, we did some cool stuff with granting conditional access to certain server-side subsystems, so that the general data flow was all end-to-end encrypted, but customers could allow certain of our processes to be "ends" and have key access. This was really elegant; customers could dial in the level of server-side access that we had, and could see via the key authorization metadata which services had that access.)

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

#138

Post by jonasdegendt »

ramraj07 wrote: post #114
ixtli wrote: post #44

They didn’t actually do what the headline claims. They made a memory cache which sits in front of S3 for the happy path. Cool but not nearly rolling your own S3

I also didnt get why the cache had to be memory and not local name storage..

Out of curiosity, why?

My first thought is, why bother with local storage if your turnaround on video chunks is 2 seconds? What's disk going to add besides a little bit more resiliency in that 2 second time frame? This at the cost of having slower pod startups given you have to mount the PVC, and a small performance hit of writing to a filesystem instead of memory.

All moot anyway given that the cameras/proxy allegedly has retries built-in, but interested to hear your thoughts.

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

#139

Post by 4gotunameagain »

Capricorn2481 wrote: post #133
4gotunameagain wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Different folks parent differently, culture evolves. You are framing it as if every change is in a positive direction, which it clearly isn't. Risking at sounding like an old man yelling at clouds, look at the kids these days. They are so dependent, and so sensitive to negative stimuli or emotions. Parents need to realise that they need to grow adults, not perpetual kids.

> look at the kids these days. They are so dependent, and so sensitive to negative stimuli or emotions. I think many of us have found people writing comments like this are not interacting with children very much. More just reading the takes of others who also don't interact with children. And if this was a legitimate problem to address, you would not address it by taking away baby monitors.

The topic of the conversation widened a bit from baby monitors. I of course do not advocate that taking away baby monitors will fix our dilapidated societies.

And while it is certainly true that I don't interact with young children a lot, the case is different for older ones or "young adults".

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

#140

Post by glitchcrab »

rpcope1 wrote: post #125
glitchcrab wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you don't _need_ it, but it's a useful convenience. Due to the layout of our house it was quite hard to hear my toddler if he was crying in the middle of the night - we often wouldn't wake up to it. So the monitor was very helpful.

Why on earth do you need an app and a camera? The same basic VTech audio monitors that are basically the same for many decades now work great, don't cost a fortune and there's no question of "where is this data going?" It's all just a big cash grab for people who need chincy tech toys for a non-problem that's better solved with way more simple kit.

You misunderstand; we're on the same wavelength. I'm not talking about an app, I'm talking about a basic audio baby monitor.
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