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We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"
151–160 of 261 posts
Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"
#152In 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?
Leading cause of death under one year is sudden infant death syndrome which happens mostly at nap time, situations where the adult may need rest, self care or housekeeping. You cannot fathomly watch an infant 24/7 especially if one parent is working and there's minimal support sistem (living far from relative, working grandparents etc)
Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"
#153I’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…
Oh, I’ve got many, many hills to die on. But at some level this is to me symptomatic of two broad things - maybe these are bigger hills:
1) a business making (seemingly) huge profits from the fears of others; more specifically from the fears of young parents who are quite often vulnerable. And, I’d suggest, offering a “solution” with no problem attached to it apart from that fear. Not to mention the issues around privacy, the fact that however many “it’s safe and encrypted” services get hacked, or sold on when the IPO comes around.
2) As another commenter says below - this is symptomatic of a type of parenting which ultimately creates fearful, anxious, badly adjusted children. Study after study shows that “free roam” children end up as better balanced humans. I’m not saying that watching and monitoring and stat-ifying your newborn is immediately going to make them anxious, but it says something about parenting which to me is unhealthy, obsessive, and ultimately not about freedom for the most important beings here: the kids.
I’m extrapolating of course, but hopefully my drift is somewhat clear..
Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Leading cause of death under one year is sudden infant death syndrome which happens mostly at nap time, situations where the adult may need rest, self care or housekeeping. You cannot fathomly watch an infant 24/7 especially if one parent is working and there's minimal support sistem (living far from relative, working grandparents etc)
"Measures not shown to be useful include positioning devices and baby monitors."
Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
24/7?
Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"
#156In 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.
It's not that easy. The only usecase that is actually really fucking easy is when both the camera and the device trying to access it is in the same network - broadcasts for discovery, that's it. Although I've seen people turn on "client isolation" in their wifi back when I did computer repairs, so it's not a given that this works!
But as soon as that assumption goes out the window - and if it's just you going into the garden to check on some weeds where the wifi doesn't reach - the task suddenly becomes so, so much harder:
- the "easiest" case is an ISP that hands your wifi router a globally routed IPv4 address, allows UPnP to be configured, and the user has UPnP configured. All that the camera has to do here is to request a port opening and that's it. Still, you as manufacturer need a server to store a mapping between user, IP address and port. (And you need to hope that the user's mobile device or their ISP doesn't have a nasty firewall blocking non-standard ports)
- No UPnP? Now you as manufacturer either need some STUN/TURN server or explain to the user how to manually enable port forwarding.
- Worst case: the user's ISP either has IPv6 only, CGNAT, double/triple/... NAT or similar shit in play because they don't have enough IP addresses to supply to their customer base. That's pretty much impossible even with STUN/TURN, sooo many ways for things to go wrong along the path.
- even a theoretical fully IPv6 world where everyone has globally routed IPv6 addresses everywhere and all ISPs have their routing working still wouldn't solve the issue... because consumer ISP routers enable a firewall on IPv6 to avoid stuff like "online game cheaters 0wning their opponents running an outdated version of their game".
The sad reality is, running a cloud service is the only actually pain-free way for any given smart Thing to work as the customer expects it.
And on top of that, a NAS capable of storing video costs about 300-ish bucks with a HDD capable of running 24/7 and eats about 10-ish watts of electricity, which is quite the cost factor on its own.
Sure, the "nerd population" here on HN can rig something up that works in a matter of a few days, including some rudimentary AI to spot if the baby managed to escape the crib. But the 99% of people out there will crash at the "please open your router's config page to allow UDP port 65535 passthrough" step, if only because they forgot the password that they set five years ago.
Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"
#157In 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
It sounds like they're not hosting it though. They are processing it, and storing it temporarily while it's queued.
A fully self hosted AI powered baby monitor that accurately detects sleep states and danger situations would be incredibly expensive today. Maybe not in a few years though.
Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"
#158I made my own S3 as well. I used two S3-compatible services before but there was always some issue(first one failed to upload certain file, no matter what and support was unhelpful; second one did not migrate with file metadata properly so i knew this would be ongoing problem). In the end, it is just a dumb file store, nothing else. All you need to do is to write a basic HTTPS API layer and some logic to handle database for the file metadata and possibly location. That is about it. Takes a few days with testing.
But then you also have to think about file uploads and file downloads. You cannot have a single server fulfilling all the roles, otherwise you have a bottleneck.
So this file storage became a private backend service that end-users never access directly. I have added upload services, whose sole purpose is to allow users to upload files and only then upload them to this central file store, essentially creating a distributed file upload queue(there is also a bit more logic regarding file id creation and validation).
Secondly, own CDN was needed for downloads. But only because I use custom access handling and could not have used any of the commercial services(though they do support access via tokens, it just was not working for me). This was tricky because I wanted for the nodes to distribute files between themselves and not always fetch them from the origin to avoid network costs on the origin server. So they had to find each other, talk to each other and know who has which file.
In short, rolling your own is not as hard as it might seem and should be preferable. Maybe to save time, use cloud at the beginning, but once you are up and running and your business idea is validated by having customer, immediately move to your own infra in order to avoid astronomical costs of cloud services.
btw, i also do video processing like mentioned in the blog post :)
Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"
#159Sounds like the title should have been > We used S3 even though it wasn’t the right service
Exactly, my first thought was "Why in earth would anyone think that S3 was the right service to store millions of tiny ephemeral files?" and now it seems they have invented their own in-memory store instead of just using something like Redis. I also wonder what happens if their DIY thingy crashes, are the videos lost? Why not send to Kinesis or SQS in the first place?
Re: We saved $500k per year by rolling our own "S3"
#160Ah, these modern babies. They can't even sleep without being spied and recorded 24/7.
I'm glad both me and my kind grew up in different times.
Today's kids will never in their lives know what freedom is, and we are guilty we made such dystopian societies a reality.