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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"

#191

Post by lupire »

breakingcups wrote: post #154
avereveard wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIDS

That statement is ambiguous with regard to automated video analysis.

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

#192

Post by anonzzzies »

Ringz wrote: post #190
brabel wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not enough “anyone can set it up trivially“.

He missed the opportunity to mention the reverse proxy, firewall with geo blocking, VPS and WireGuard, Grafana and Loki setup.

You joke but wireguard and, very easily, tailscale, solves most crap you normally need to fix. Close everything with ufw and put tailscale, and then you trivially have access from any device / desktop.

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

#193

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#194

Post by ghm2180 »

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…

Why is it hard for a local device to expose a REST API from home —a DDNS updater could update IP address for a cname — and then access all the local data local_device(REST API) Smartphone?

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

#195

Post by ChicagoBoy11 »

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 unfortunately did spring for a Nanit, but am keen to stop paying the subscription... any pointers of a resource you'd encourage me to look at to try to the same thing you did?

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

#196

Post by jen20 »

hshdhdhehd wrote: post #77
jen20 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the reason I refused to buy Nanit cameras, instead opting for unconnected models. E2E encryption is table stakes.

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 very useful, especially living in a house with a layout that doesn’t lend itself to hearing a pin drop in the next room.

The v-tech ones are fine though. No need for anything with an Internet connection (though some of them even do now).

Source: also 2 kids.

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

#197

Post by coleca »

freak42 wrote: post #115

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

That's a great point. Sometimes we look for architecture or technology solutions for a problem that could be easily solved at the sales level by negotiating a PPA (Private Pricing Addendum) with AWS.

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

#200

Post by ghm2180 »

jonasdegendt wrote: post #138
ramraj07 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alleged…

> What's disk going to add besides a little bit more resiliency

Resiliency is the point. How would you protect against machine's loss/crash?

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