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

https://engineering.nanit.com/how-we-saved-500-000-per-year-by-rolling-our-own-s3-6caec1ee1143

by mpweiher • 9 months ago

328 219 9 months ago

engineering.nanit.com

Havoc• 9 months ago

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

tcdent• 9 months ago

Yeah, so now you're basically running a heavy instance in order to get the network throughput and the RAM, but not really using that much CPU when you could probably handle the encode with the available headroom. Although the article lists TLS handshakes as being a significant source of CPU usage, I must be missing something because I don't see how that is anywhere near the top of the constraints of a system like this.

Regardless, I enjoyed the article and I appreciate that people are still finding ways to build systems tailored to their workflows.

inlined2• 9 months ago

Maybe they’re not using keepalives in their clients causing thousands of handshakes per second?

ahoka• 9 months ago

TLS being a bottleneck when doing image processing is very-very weird.

elevation• 9 months ago

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.

halJordan• 9 months ago

Agreed, but the first design principle is "eliminate complexity at the design level." MVPs and what they represent (a failure to design) are an albatross

none2585• 9 months ago

I'm curious how many engineers per year this costs to maintain

UseofWeapons1• 9 months ago

Yes, that was my thought as well. Breakeven might be like 1 (give or take 2x)?

hinkley4• 9 months ago

Anything worth doing needs three people. Even if they also are used for other things.

codedokode7• 9 months ago

And I am curious how many engineer years it requires to port code to cloud services and deal with multiple issues you cannot even debug due to not having root privileges in the cloud.

Without cloud, saving a file is as simple as "with open(...) as f: f.write(data)" + adding a record to DB. And no weird network issues to debug.

rajamaka3• 9 months ago

as simple as "with open(...) as f: f.write(data)"

Save where? With what redundancy? With what access policies? With what backup strategy? With what network topology? With what storage equipment and file system and HVAC system and...

Without on-prem, saving a file is as simple as s3.put_object() !

hinkley4• 9 months ago

Variation on an old classic.

Question: How do you save a small fortune in cloud savings?

Answer: First start with a large fortune.

RedShift1• 9 months ago

Ah that is where logging and traceability comes in! But not to worry, the cloud has excellent tools for that! The fact that logging and tracing will become half your cloud cost, oh well let's just sweep that under the rug.

beoberha• 9 months ago

A lot of reductive anti-cloud stuff gets posted here, but this might be the granddaddy of them all.

mjr00• 9 months ago

Without cloud, saving a file is as simple as "with open(...) as f: f.write(data)" + adding a record to DB. And no weird network issues to debug.

There may be some additional features that S3 has over a direct filesystem write to a SSD in your closet. The people paying for cloud spend are paying for those features.

nbngeorcjhe• 9 months ago

A small fraction of 1, probably? It sounds like a fairly simple service that shouldn't require much ongoing development

hinkley4• 9 months ago

You're going to run a production system with a bus number of 1?

I think you mean a small fraction of 3 engineers. And small fractions aren't that small.

codedokode7• 9 months ago

Especially if you have access to LLMs.

codedokode7• 9 months ago

What I notice, that large companies use their own private cloud and datacenters. At their scale, it is cheaper to have their own storage. As a side business, they also sell cloud services themselves. And small companies probably don't have that much data to justify paying for a cloud instead of buying several SSDs/HDDs or creating SMB share on their Windows server.

CaptainOfCoit• 9 months ago

I'm curious how many engineers per year this costs to maintain

The end of the article has this:

Consider custom infrastructure when you have both: sufficient scale for meaningful cost savings, and specific constraints that enable a simple solution. The engineering effort to build and maintain your system must be less than the infrastructure costs it eliminates. In our case, specific requirements (ephemeral storage, loss tolerance, S3 fallback) let us build something simple enough that maintenance costs stay low. Without both factors, stick with managed services.

Seems they were well aware of the tradeoffs.

DevelopingElk• 9 months ago

Video processing is one of those things that need caution when doing serverlessly. This solution makes sense, especially because S3s durability guarantees aren't needed.

VladVladikoff• 9 months ago

I’m mostly just impressed that some janky baby monitor has racked up server fees on this scale. Amazing example of absolutely horrible engineering.

Also, just take an old phone from your drawer full of old phones, slap some free camera app on it, zip tie a car phone mount to the crib, and boom you have a free baby monitor.

bombcar• 9 months ago

If you don’t have fifty to a hundred dodgy PoE cameras from Alibaba tied to the crib do you even really love the baby?

vachina2• 9 months ago

In a capitalist society it is intuitive to outsource every ounce of effort to somebody else.

Huxley1• 9 months ago

S3 certainly saves a lot of hassle, but in certain use cases, it really is prohibitively expensive. Has anyone tried self-hosted alternatives like MinIO or SeaweedFS? Or taken even more radical approaches? How do you balance between stability, maintenance overhead, and cost savings?

ddxv• 9 months ago

MinIO has moved away from having a free community fork, and I think it's base cost is close to $100k a year. I've been using Garage and been happy, but as a single dev and orders of magnitude smaller than the OP, so there are certainly edge cases I'm missing to compare the two.

Cerium• 9 months ago

I'm a fellow new Garage user. I have had a great time so far - but I also don't need much. My use case is to share data analysis results with a small team. I wanted something simple to manage that can provide an s3 like interface to work with off the shelf data analysis tools.

dxxvi3• 9 months ago

So, you want a place to store many files in a short period of time and when there's a new file, somebody must be notified?

Have you ever thought of using a postgresql db (also on aws) to store those files and use CDC to publish messages about those files to a kafka topic? In your original way, we need 3 aws services: s3, lambda and sqs. With this way, we need 2: postgresql and kafka. I'm not sure how well this method works though :-)

jrochkind15• 9 months ago

Like put the video blobs themselves in postgres data columns? Does putting very large (relative to what you normally put in postgres) files in pg work well? Genuine question, i do not know, I've been considering it too and hesitant about it.

dxxvi3• 9 months ago

I already checked with AI before putting the comment :-)

1GB with the bytea data type (https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/datatype-binary.html) and 4TB with the BLOB data type (https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/BinaryFilesInDB).

dxxvi3• 9 months ago

I've been considering it too and hesitant about it

Why hesitant? Just ask AI. It'll tell you how to do it and then you can experiment it yourself.

ravedave5• 9 months ago

I've dealt with images in a database and it was a disaster, the transfer times are garbage.

ixtli• 9 months ago

They didn’t actually do what the headline claims. They made a memory cache which sits in front of S3 for the happy path. Cool but not nearly rolling your own S3

ramraj075• 9 months ago

I also didnt get why the cache had to be memory and not local name storage..

jonasdegendt• 9 months ago

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 allegedly has retries built-in, but interested to hear your thoughts.

jrochkind15• 9 months ago

True, but, if i'm following, the memory cache has to clone S3 API for existing clients that can't be easily altered. Regardless of what you title it, it's an interesting project report!

varenc11• 9 months ago

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 additional $200 on a Nanit floor stand if you want sleep tracking. This is purely a software limitation since there's plenty of other ways to get an overhead camera mount. (I'm curious how they even detect if you're using the stand since it's just a USB-C cable. Maybe etags?)

Of course Nanit is a popular and successful product that many parents swear by. It just pains me to see cloud based in-home audio/video storage being so normalized. Self-hosted video isn't that hard but no one makes a baby-monitor centric solution. I'm sure the cloud based video storage model will continue to be popular because it's easy, but also because it helps justifies a recurring subscription.

edit: just noticed an irony in my comment. I'm ranting about Nanit locking users into their 3rd party cloud video storage, and the article is about Nanit's engineering team moving off a 3rd party (S3) and self-hosting their own storage. Props to them for getting off S3.

jen204• 9 months ago

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

hshdhdhehd• 9 months ago

By the way you dont need a video (or hell even audio) baby monitor. Source: 2 kids.

sbrother5• 9 months ago

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 consumer software for this sort of thing, but given the choice of that or actually usable software, I am going to pick the latter.

vlovich123• 9 months ago

The vtech camera is working well enough for me for what it’s worth. But any such app solution generally implies transfer through the company’s servers.

varenc11• 9 months ago

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 which is a convenient and a more user friendly way to access it. And HomeKit also gives you out-of-home access with a hub. I love my setup, but I couldn't in good conscience recommend it to a non-techie friend, especially if they're sleep deprived from their infant.

But I do miss the lack of any baby-specific features like sleep tracking. It has support for crying detection, but that's it.

vachina2• 9 months ago

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.

bialpio• 9 months ago

I have 2 free-roaming rabbits in one room of the house, we've been using Eufy camera to access live feed and found no issues with it, definitely would buy again. And the SD card recording allows us to seek a couple days into the past - it is pretty fun to watch the rabbits scramble to the automatic feeder at the set time.

gambiting• 9 months ago

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.

jrochkind15• 9 months ago

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?)

kdamica• 9 months ago

We've used an offline Infant Optics baby camera for three kids and have never wished for any of the smart features that online cameras offer. You really just want to know whether they are asleep and when they are crying. I just don't see a good use case for recording all that video for most kids. (I'm sure there are special needs situations where it is helpful)

cbg0• 9 months ago

Self-hosted video isn't that hard

Self-hosting video is not something the typical user of a baby monitor would ever even consider.

unethical_ban2• 9 months ago

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

I'm not leaving a baby at home while I go on vacation. I would never be on another network, even. Why need the cloud?

gblargg2• 9 months ago

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.

globular-toast• 9 months ago

My parents bought a camcorder in 1995 and "self-hosted" the video just fine. But you're right it shouldn't even be something consumers should consider, because it should be the default and should be easy. You can get low power SSD-powered NAS devices now so hopefully this will change soon.

varenc11• 9 months ago

I meant more that in the abstract technical sense it's not that hard of a problem, but I agree that given the options available to consumers it is hard.

If UniFi Protect was re-skinned and had a bunch of its security camera complexity removed and optimized for the baby-camera use case it'd be normal consumer level friendly.

spockz2• 9 months ago

We just used ipcams with our kids. Now with ubiquity it is dead simple to setup also storage for it. I think synology supports anything that emits rtsp.

Baby monitors around here -Alecto is a popular brand - cost twice as much and have only half the capabilities.

chrismorgan• 9 months ago

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, plus dumb servers that are only used for blind routing and storage. In this instance, it sounds like Nanit aren’t doing any routing or (persistent) storage: the sole purpose of the upload is offloading processing to the cloud. Given that, you can have transport encryption (typically TLS), but end-to-end encryption is not possible.

If you wanted the same functionality with end-to-end encryption, you’d need to do the video analysis locally, and upload the results, instead of uploading the entire video. This would presumably require more powerful hardware, or some way of offloading that to a nominated computer or phone.

BrandoElFollito• 9 months ago

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.

johnisgood• 9 months ago

Exactly. There is no video analysis if the video is encrypted and they cannot decrypt it. If there is E2EE and you expect them to do the video analysis, they need to be able to decrypt the video. Alternatively, you do it locally, but then why bother uploading anything at all, encrypted or not? So ultimately E2EE would not help here at all.

varenc11• 9 months ago

It's true. But nanit only gives you things like sleep insights if you buy their $200 stand and pay for a bigger subscription. Many users aren't making use of this. They do provide motion alerts, but those could happen on device.

Apple has done some interesting this with privacy-centric cloud processing. Might be some way to eventually get the benefits of cloud based detections without revealing your video.

also my other gripe is they also store audio. Which personally I feel like is even more sensitive. Wish their was an option to allow live audio listening but not store any audio in the cloud.

bee_rider• 9 months ago

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?

thaumasiotes• 9 months ago

Yes, the normal solution to wondering how a baby is doing is to look over at it.

avereveard2• 9 months ago

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)

hobofan• 9 months ago

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 in networks with unknown topology and quirks (e.g. ISP provider being overly conservative in their firewall presets). If that in general would be a more trivial issue you would see less cloud services.

(You would probably still a similar amount of cloud services due the increased monetization options, but this would level the playing field for local-only options.)

JCM93• 9 months ago

It’s an over engineered solution to a, relatively, simple problem of access long the device on the local network. This used to be a hard problem to solve but in 2025 I’d question why they’re going through the headache of all this cloud stuff when they could just build a quality device that runs locally with a simple base station that triggers alerts. They only hosting they really need is something to send alerts to an app.

Aurornis6• 9 months ago

Yes, a parent is always around. The part you might be missing is that the parent doesn’t want to have to limit their movements to areas where WiFi coverage is good.

Many cheap baby monitors are WiFi connected. You have to haul the video unit around and keep it live to hear when it cuts out, then move back toward where WiFi coverage was good.

This won’t seem like a big deal to someone who lives in an apartment or who has a house with 7 Ubiquiti APs covering everywhere inside and out, but it is a big deal to a parent who has a single WiFi router and wants to be able to do something like pull weeds in the yard, have a conversation with the neighbor, or go to a detached garage and work on a project without having to worry about their exact WiFi coverage at every moment to check on the baby.

tonyhart7• 9 months ago

"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

mschuster912• 9 months ago

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.

Aurornis6• 9 months ago

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 the neighbors or go out in the yard without worrying about missing baby monitor events is a huge advantage that many parents will pay for.

I think this entire comment section is a prime example of HN not understanding non-technical audiences.

afro882• 9 months ago

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.

sintax• 9 months ago

Now imagine all that video/audio footage being used/sold for AI training data.

mherkender• 9 months ago

I run a Unifi Protect setup, local only.

They don't provide a display, so I put a Raspberry Pi, a display, and an audio hat in an enclosure. It plays an rtsp stream from the camera at startup and works pretty well.

JCM93• 9 months ago

+1 for Unifi. They’ve added “baby crying” to the audio monitoring for triggering alerts. Everything is kept local on your LAN. Can access remotely via an app if you wish, but that’s simply accessing the device on your LAN so no dumping all your footage into some random “cloud.” Stuff just works and requires no subscription so all your money goes towards better quality hardware.

Aurornis6• 9 months ago

You must spend an additional $200 on a Nanit floor stand if you want sleep tracking. This is purely a software limitation since there's plenty of other ways to get an overhead camera mount. (I'm curious how they even detect if you're using the stand since it's just a USB-C cable. Maybe etags?)

I made a simple wood mount and painted it to match the crib. It worked well. There was no software enforcement requiring you to buy their mount at the time. Has this changed recently?

lunias• 9 months ago

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".

lpa22• 9 months ago

If anyone here uses the Nanit app in the background of their phones, it absolutely destroys battery life.

I got a new phone because I thought my battery was cooked, but turns out it was just the app.

mring33621• 9 months ago

while (true) { Thread.sleep(300L); checkIsSubscriptionCurrent(); },

probably

another_twist• 9 months ago

I mean the "S3" could be replaced with object storage. I guess thats the technical term anyway. Having said that just goes to show how cheap S3 is, if after all of this, the savings are just $500k. Definitely money saved but not a lot.

OrangeDelonge• 9 months ago

Couldn’t they have used S3 express one zone?

NetOpWibby2• 9 months ago

Cloudflare R2 solves this

bryanrasmussen• 9 months ago

they don't seem to have factored in the cost of doing this, so not sure what their actual saving was although it was probably substantial.

gnarlouse• 9 months ago

because "How we stopped putting your kids in S3 buckets"

just sounded less attractive

szszrk• 9 months ago

They can't say that, as they did not stop. They made a cache in front of it.

anarsdk• 9 months ago

Sounds like the title should have been

We used S3 even though it wasn’t the right service

Gasp0de2• 9 months ago

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?

alex_smart• 9 months ago

From the article, individual video segments were 2-6 MB in size and SQS and Kinesis have a 1MB limit for individual records so they couldn’t have used either service directly. At least not without breaking their segments into even smaller chunks.

dmje3• 9 months ago

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 need “every breath, seen”. People have been having babies for fucking centuries without entering them into this hyper weird surveillance state at birth.

What an appalling screwed up world we seem to have manufactured for ourselves.

ramraj075• 9 months ago

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. Sounds innocuous to me.

Many of us can do the math ourselves and choose to make choices based on our own beliefs. That's true freedom.

4gotunameagain2• 9 months ago

Different folks parent differently, culture evolves.

You are framing it as if every change is in a positive direction, which it clearly isn't. Risking at sounding like an old man yelling at clouds, look at the kids these days. They are so dependent, and so sensitive to negative stimuli or emotions.

Parents need to realise that they need to grow adults, not perpetual kids.

dmje3• 9 months ago

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..

anshumankmr• 9 months ago

Some stuff like this also exists: https://www.dell.com/en-in/shop/storage-servers-and-networki...

We could just use something like that

Or there is that other Object storage solution called R1 from Cloudflare.

tauntz• 9 months ago

* R2

freak42• 9 months ago

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

bdcravens• 9 months ago

I suspect it's a massive amount, as S3 is one of the cheaper services. As we evaluate moving all of our compute off of AWS, S3 (and SQS) are probably services we'll retain because they are still amazing values.

coleca• 9 months ago

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.

0xbadcafebee• 9 months ago

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 sustained/baseline rating for both EBS types as well as instance types. Use https://instances.vantage.sh/ (and make sure you choose specific columns) to compare specific criteria and then export as a CSV to find the lowest price that matches your performance/feature/platform criteria. Design to the baseline if you need guaranteed performance. Do sustained performance testing.

When we Terminated connections idle >10 minutes, memory dropped by ~1 GB immediately; confirming the leak was from dangling sockets. Fix: make sockets short-lived and enforce time limits.

We used to do that with Apache 20 years ago. Config option forces a forked subchild to exit after N requests to avoid the inevitable memory leaks. AKA the Windows 95 garbage collector (a reboot a day keeps the slowness at bay).

FWIW, if the business feasibility of your architecture depends on custom stuff, performance enhancements, etc, you will find that you eventually have harder and harder problems to solve to keep your business functioning. It's more reliable to waste money on a solution that is brainless, than invest human ingenuity/technical mastery in a solution that is frugal.

dilyevsky• 9 months ago

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.

danjc• 9 months ago

I'd it's processed in 2 seconds, why not just process it immediately in memory?

swiftcoder2• 9 months ago

Because they are serverless, so there's currently no memory for it to be processed in at the point of upload

liqilin1567• 9 months ago

Maybe there are too many requests, so they have to offload the videos to s3.

dboreham2• 9 months ago

That's not the reason. And furthermore any buffer/re-try mechanism should be done at the edge (on the camera).

swiftcoder2• 9 months ago

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 you could eliminate S3, the queue in SQS, and the lambdas all in one fell swoop...

_el1s7• 9 months ago

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.

chatmasta• 9 months ago

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…

Brian_K_White• 9 months ago

unnecessary cloud subscription service abjures unnecessary cloud subscription service

gethly• 9 months ago

I 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 :)

miroljub• 9 months ago

Ah, 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.

hk1337• 9 months ago

I have always understood S3 is just HDFS with some extra features? So, if you were going to roll your own S3, then you’d stand up an HDFS cluster.

ruperthair2• 9 months ago

This may be an obvious point, but I didn't see it mentioned in the (otherwise excellent) article: I would have been interested in the cost saving in just implementing the 'delete on read' with S3 that they ended up using with the home-made in-memory cache solution. I can't see this on the S3 billing page, but if the usage is billed per-second, as with some other AWS services, then the savings may be significant.

The solution they document also matches the S3 'reduced redundancy' storage option, so I hope they had this enabled from day one.

JCM93• 9 months ago

The article strikes me as a self congratulatory solution to solving a problem that they could just have avoided entirely by instead selling hardware with local video storage. Lots of options for doing that efficiently and inexpensively in 2025. Hosting everything in the cloud like this is a 2015-era solution.

ghm21803• 9 months ago

Actually why(just) RAM? Why not have an append only storage to the local disk? WALs are quite fast.

fergie• 9 months ago

I mean fair enough, but I feel like S3 is one of the few AWS products that is actually pretty cheap for what you get.

elmigranto• 9 months ago

Classic case of "focus on building your app, not infrastructure". Here's another multi-million dollar idea: put this cache directly inside your own video processing server and upload there.

jrochkind15• 9 months ago

What a great and helpful write-up, love when people share things like this so I can learn.

It's less about whether I would have a use case for this exact thing (or whether or not it was appropriate for this use case, i dunno, prob don't have enough context to know).

More just seeing what is possible, how they thought about it and analyzed it, what they found unexpected and how, etc. I learned a lot!

kingnothing• 9 months ago

Nanit is horrible spyware. Do not buy their products.

If you have a router that lets you inspect data flowing out, you'll be astonished at what your little Nanit cam exfiltrates from your home network. Even if you don't pay for their subscription service, they still attempt to exfil all of the video footage caught on your camera to their servers. You can block it and it will still work, but you shouldn't have to do that in the first place if you don't pay for their cloud service.

Stay away if you value your privacy.

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

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