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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"

#121

Post by rendaw »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #53
Lucian6 wrote: post #38

[flagged]

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.

> For high-throughput workloads (>500 req/s), we actually saw better cost efficiency with S3 due to their economies of scale on bandwidth. The breakeven point seems to be around 100-200TB of relatively static data with predictable access patterns. Below that, the operational overhead of running your own storage likely exceeds S3's markup.

I just spent 5 minutes reading this over and over, but it still doesn't make any sense to me. First it says that high throughput = s3, low throughput = self hosted. Then it says low throughput = s3, (therefore high throughput = self hosted).

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

#123

Post by bdcravens »

freak42 wrote: post #115

They saved $500k on what total sum? $500'001 or 55'000'000? Without this info the post is moot.

I suspect it's a massive amount, as S3 is one of the cheaper services. As we evaluate moving all of our compute off of AWS, S3 (and SQS) are probably services we'll retain because they are still amazing values.

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

#124

Post by skrause »

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.

The baby monitor could have its own SD card and webserver and then you provide a smartphone app which uses local network discovery to find the server and talk to it.

In that case no parent needs to know about Synology or even IP addresses.

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

#125

Post by rpcope1 »

glitchcrab wrote: post #105
hshdhdhehd wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the way you dont need a video (or hell even audio) baby monitor. Source: 2 kids.

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.

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

#126

Post by BoredPositron »

deaux wrote: post #111
BoredPositron wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the verbose writing style. I can see why you would be accused as well.

FWIW the people accusing the person you're replying to would be clearly wrong as this sentence alone directly rules it out being straight LLM output: > and nowadays the suspected cause will be LLM. It's very unlike the original person, who is a bot indeed.

I know. The problem is that extreme verbose writing styles get associated with LLMs it's in the same vain as em-dashes.

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

#127

Post by bialpio »

sbrother wrote: post #64
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…

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…

I have 2 free-roaming rabbits in one room of the house, we've been using Eufy camera to access live feed and found no issues with it, definitely would buy again. And the SD card recording allows us to seek a couple days into the past - it is pretty fun to watch the rabbits scramble to the automatic feeder at the set time.

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

#130

Post by swiftcoder »

This feels like they were using the wrong architecture from the start, and are now papering over that problem with additional layers of cache.

The only practical reason to put a video in S3 for an average of 2 seconds is to provide additional redundancy, and replacing that with a cache removes most of the redundancy.

Feels like if you uploaded these to an actual server, the server could process them on upload, and you could eliminate S3, the queue in SQS, and the lambdas all in one fell swoop...

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