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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"

#231

Post by rhinoceraptor »

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.

It calls back the classic, "you can already build such a system quite trivially": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

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

#232

Post by elevation »

Havoc wrote: post #3

Tbh I feel this in one of those that would be significantly cleaner without serverless in first place. Sticking something with 2 second lifespan on disk to shoehorn it into aws serverless paradigm created problems and cost out of thin air here Good solution moving at least partially to a in memory solution though

The scalable in-memory solution took quite a bit of testing to get right. Building this on the early side of the business when the requirements are not well known can be a giant budget and time tar pit. Plus without customers it’s hard to confidently test at scale.

Using S3 for an MVP and marking this component as “done” seems like the right solution, regardless of the serverless paradigm.

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

#233

Post by lunias »

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…

You'll never convince me that the term "cloud" came into existence for any purpose other than to separate itself from "the internet". That way, normal people who were very steadfast for years about not putting personal information on the internet would start putting their personal information in the "cloud".

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

#234

Post by ramraj07 »

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…

reduced cost? you can have same storage in nvme (and for this purpose, sufficient performance) at a tenth or hundredth the cost of the same storage in memory in AWS.

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

#235

Post by mschuster91 »

Aurornis wrote: post #217
mschuster91 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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! B…

> 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: Exactly. There are a lot of comments in this thread from people who are either non-parents or who haven’t lived in a situation where they didn’t have perfect WiFi coverage of their entire living area. Being able to visit t…

> Exactly. There are a lot of comments in this thread from people who are either non-parents or who haven’t lived in a situation where they didn’t have perfect WiFi coverage of their entire living area.

... and from people who take care of configuring their entire smart home crap of their entire relatives. In Germany we have a joke roughly translated to "Christmas is the time of the year where the children come back home to fix their parents' computers" for a reason - but a lot of people don't have family or friends who can deal with getting stuff set up.

The average user isn't competent enough to deal with a setup flow more complicated than "install this app, scan this QR code on the device, enter your wifi password, that's it". The user neither knows nor cares to know that the Thing sets up a temporary wifi access point (whose credentials are in the QR code), gets the home wifi credentials via a small API endpoint, tests the connectivity and then shuts down the temporary wifi. For them, it Just Works.

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

#236

Post by chipsrafferty »

krisoft wrote: post #188
skrause wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> In that case no parent needs to know about Synology or even IP addresses. But they need to know about networking enough to be on the same network. I understand that sounds easy, but every time someone gets confused about their cursed setup the company making the device will get a returned product and an angry review. Client isolation, multiple wifi networks, some devices being on wifi some on the mobile network.

Companies are making it harder and harder to use, or at least to understand how to use, your own network for anything other than "get Internet on device"

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

#237

Post by dmje »

ramraj07 wrote: post #222
dmje wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pri…

You're definitely extrapolating, and honestly in my opinion in the worst possible direction. At a fundamental level, I personally believe that the generations raised in the previous half century (50s till 90s) are the most coddled, selfish, populations in the history of humanity: no major calamity or war, or pandemic, or anything really. Kids did enjoy insane freedoms and dangers but in retrospect doesnt look like th…

Wow. And you guys seem totally balanced…

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

#238

Post by jrochkind1 »

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…

> you can turn on the app from anywhere you happen to be and expect the video feed to work

if i'm understanding "anywhere you happen to be" right: Real question -- I'm not a parent. What is your use case for wanting to monitor your baby remotely from a different location than your baby? Obviously someone is with them at the house or location with the baby! You don't trust em? Or just like seeing/hearing your baby when you are out?

I see why a baby monitor in general is helpful so you can be in another room in the house and still keep an eye/ear on baby, but obv someone has to actually be in the location with the baby! (and the monitor at least needs to be on the wifi, right? So the monitor is in a place you have network access to, yes?)

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

#239

Post by danudey »

MathiasPius wrote: post #147
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 si…

Yeah, the entire point of this seems to be "we'll watch your baby monitor and provide alerts if something happens". That requires either processing on a server (as they do), processing on the uploading client (the camera), or having a receiving client which is constantly receiving that data and analyzing it to provide alerts.

The third option is unreliable because if that "client" (a desktop app, a phone app, etc.) dies, then the process stops working completely. The second option is unreliable because if you increase the cost of the camera then most users will buy the other camera because everyone is financially constrained these days.

That basically just leaves the first option as the only practical one at an appealing price point.

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

#240

Post by varenc »

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.

I just rely on UniFi and HomeKit for out of home access! But you're so right I could also access remotely via my Wireguard server or Tailscale running on my ubiquiti console... Wish I could hook up baby events like "poop diaper" to Grafana.
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