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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"

#171

Post by cube00 »

hobofan wrote: post #165
bee_rider wrote: post #116

Earlier 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?

The "point" of the cloud service is that it's sadly usually the easiest way to create a [on-premise-device] [user's smartphone/laptop] for B2C/residential deployments of appliances (like the baby monitor in this case). It's much easier to create a device internet connection + a smartphone internet connection that it is to deal with the myriad of issues that occur if you try to do local device smartphone connections i…

Hopefully as IPv6 gets more adoption we'll be able to open up some of these services, although IoT devices never get firmware updates so they'll have to sit behind Wireguard so maybe not.

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

#172

Post by [deleted] »

avereveard wrote: post #152
bee_rider wrote: post #116

Earlier 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)

[deleted]

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

#173

Post by ycombinete »

sbrother wrote: post #70
vachina wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What competitor have you actually tried? My girlfriend’s parents have a few cheap TPlink solar powered CCTV and they work flawlessly since setup. I used to jerryrig an Android phone for Alfred and that too worked well. My impression is live feed is a solved problem.

I tried a high end Philips one and a Nest camera. Both were way less reliable than the Nanit. Possibly because they didn’t play nicely with my mesh WiFi at home. But regardless I just wanted to vouch for Nanit’s software, whatever they are doing with their networking and UX is really good.

Beware of Philips in general: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE58YisgFeQ

They've mostly sold off bits of themselves, and/or licensed their name to other producers. It's highly unlikely that Philips actually made that camera.

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

#174

Post by close04 »

sbrother wrote: post #71
varenc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I self host my "baby monitor" with UniFi Protect on UCG-Max and a G6 Instant wireless camera. It's more work to setup, but pretty easy for a techie. It has the "turn on the app anywhere and it works" feature, and with a 2TB SSD I get a month+ of video storage. Because storage is local, it doesn't need to compress the video and I get a super clear 4K image. And I use Homebridge to expose the camera over Apple HomeKit…

Ok that’s really cool; I didn’t know you could set up Apple’s smart home thingy to forward a live feed to the cloud.

I have a bunch of cameras from various vendors, some with open FW, some with their original FW, all cut off from the internet. They used to be connected to Frigate but due to performance issues I offloaded the work to Scrypted on a RPi and an AppleTV and the setup works great. It was easy to set up and it's easier to use than any other app, assuming you are into the Apple Home ecosystem.

It's not really self hosted since it relies on Apple but it's the least evil at this point. Giving unencrypted video and audio to some company (if what OP says is right) would be way beyond my risk tolerance point.

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

#175

Post by brabel »

theanonymousone wrote: post #168
varenc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I self host my "baby monitor" with UniFi Protect on UCG-Max and a G6 Instant wireless camera. It's more work to setup, but pretty easy for a techie. It has the "turn on the app anywhere and it works" feature, and with a 2TB SSD I get a month+ of video storage. Because storage is local, it doesn't need to compress the video and I get a super clear 4K image. And I use Homebridge to expose the camera over Apple HomeKit…

This is indeed far more of a "HN Style" comment.

Not enough “anyone can set it up trivially“.

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

#176

Post by brabel »

sbrother wrote: post #71
varenc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I self host my "baby monitor" with UniFi Protect on UCG-Max and a G6 Instant wireless camera. It's more work to setup, but pretty easy for a techie. It has the "turn on the app anywhere and it works" feature, and with a 2TB SSD I get a month+ of video storage. Because storage is local, it doesn't need to compress the video and I get a super clear 4K image. And I use Homebridge to expose the camera over Apple HomeKit…

Ok that’s really cool; I didn’t know you could set up Apple’s smart home thingy to forward a live feed to the cloud.

I have a smarthome setup I built myself using Lua and a Raspberry Pi. Anything it can do locally can be securely exposed on the internet via a service like netbird , which I use for free and is literally a command to get running, or tail-scale which I believe is harder to use. I don’t have video but I think that would work in that scenario as well.

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

#177

Post by matt-p »

varenc wrote: post #67
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…

I self host my "baby monitor" with UniFi Protect on UCG-Max and a G6 Instant wireless camera. It's more work to setup, but pretty easy for a techie. It has the "turn on the app anywhere and it works" feature, and with a 2TB SSD I get a month+ of video storage. Because storage is local, it doesn't need to compress the video and I get a super clear 4K image. And I use Homebridge to expose the camera over Apple HomeKit…

You've still had to buy a proprietary system, it just happens to run locally? Not really much better is it.

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

#178

Post by metmac »

varenc wrote: post #67
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…

I self host my "baby monitor" with UniFi Protect on UCG-Max and a G6 Instant wireless camera. It's more work to setup, but pretty easy for a techie. It has the "turn on the app anywhere and it works" feature, and with a 2TB SSD I get a month+ of video storage. Because storage is local, it doesn't need to compress the video and I get a super clear 4K image. And I use Homebridge to expose the camera over Apple HomeKit…

I came here to say, this is exactly what I do also.

Unifi accidentally made a fantastic baby monitor.

The recent APIs they’ve built makes me hopeful that I could run an AI model against the footage eventually and build those Ai features for myself.

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

#179

Post by chatmasta »

_el1s7 wrote: post #167
swiftcoder wrote: post #130

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 yo…

Yes, it's simple, S3 is for storing objects, not for processing. Don't know how they came up with such a bad and complicated cloud design for something that is straight forward.

It’s a pattern prominently featured in AWS docs… upload to S3, react to CloudEvent in SQS, download and process with Lambda, upload back to S3…

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

#180

Post by eqvinox »

matt-p wrote: post #177
varenc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I self host my "baby monitor" with UniFi Protect on UCG-Max and a G6 Instant wireless camera. It's more work to setup, but pretty easy for a techie. It has the "turn on the app anywhere and it works" feature, and with a 2TB SSD I get a month+ of video storage. Because storage is local, it doesn't need to compress the video and I get a super clear 4K image. And I use Homebridge to expose the camera over Apple HomeKit…

You've still had to buy a proprietary system, it just happens to run locally? Not really much better is it.

Sure, not perfect, but quite a bit better. Getting from A to Z involves a few letters inbetween...
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