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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"

#141

Post by dilyevsky »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #119

Their architecture is internet bandwidth heavy and storage heavy; these are some of the most expensive things in AWS. You probably want to use a different provider for those things. > It turns out that when AWS says an instance can do “Up to 12.5 Gbps”, that’s burstable networking backed by credits; when you’re below the baseline, you accrue credits and can burst for short periods. Yes, AWS has a burst rating and a s…

They're very ingest heavy compared to how much of it is actually streamed out and to a very small/local audience so probably don't even need a cdn. And ingest on aws is free.

On the other hand, S3 is kind of ridiculously expensive compared to even more expensive on-prem options like a PureStorage SSDs array. With spindles on Ceph you can probably get quite a bit lower than AWS's 2c/Gig/mo. Or you can just use R2 with colocated servers for ingest.

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

#142

Post by tonyhart7 »

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 but no one makes a baby-monitor centric solution"

I don't understand this attitude, sure its easy for some people but MOST people want an easy out of the box solution

its nothing wrong with that

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

#143

Post by pestaa »

codedokode wrote: post #56
rajamaka wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't need to care about this when using SSDs/HDDs. You do need to care when you move beyond a single server in a closet that runs your database, webserver and storage. > No risk of leaking files due to misconfigured cloud services. One misconfigured .htaccess file for example, could result in leaking files.

> One misconfigured .htaccess First, I hope nobody is using Apache anymore, second, you typically store files outside of web directory.

Why nobody should use Apache? I rediscovered it to be great in many use cases. And there's llms to help with the config syntax.

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

#145

Post by d1sxeyes »

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.

I think the point is that effectively this is E2EE due to TLS, because the server is expected to be able to decrypt the data (and so is one “end”).

That’s not what most people expect though.

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

#146

Post by gambiting »

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…

My £15 TP-Link camera that we use as a baby monitor works 100% of the time. I can use it completely locally too with nothing sent to their servers at all, or use it through the internet if I want to. Got 4+ years of continuous use and counting, with zero issues.

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

#147

Post by MathiasPius »

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.

Technically there are two clients: The camera and whatever device is used to access the feed.

I can absolutely imagine an architecture where video can be streamed in an encrypted manner, or stored in encrypted time-stamped blobs, allowing the server to provide rough searching, and then the client can perform fine-grained scanning.

This obviously doesn't enable any kind of processing of the video data on the server side, and doing it on the receiving client would require the feed to be active This means that any kind of processing would almost necessarily have to happen on the sending device, which would probably increase the power and compute requirements by a lot.

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

#148

Post by codedokode »

pestaa wrote: post #143
codedokode wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One misconfigured .htaccess First, I hope nobody is using Apache anymore, second, you typically store files outside of web directory.

Why nobody should use Apache? I rediscovered it to be great in many use cases. And there's llms to help with the config syntax.

Performance not great compared to nginx.

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

#149

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#150

Post by gblargg »

renewiltord wrote: post #109
gblargg wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah but the reality of the microSD card is weird. E.g. Eufy puts the video on the card but encrypts it so you have to pull it through the camera through the app to your phone. It's hilariously crazy but we were given the cams as a gift so we stuck with them.

That's always annoyed me about Eufy, but it hasn't been a practical problem given they're mounted in hard-to-reach areas. I think the feature is to avoid a thief being able to view the footage. I like that they support RTSP access for a NAS/live viewing without their bloated app.
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