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.

> Self-hosted video isn't that hard

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

> 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 security (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.

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?

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)

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.

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

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.

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

Right. Having worked on a commercial S3 compatible storage I can tell y'all that there's a lot more to it then just sticking some files on JBOD. It does depend on your specific requirements though. 1.5 FTE over 18 months sounds on the low side for everything you've described.

That said the article seems to be more about an optimization of their pipeline to reduce the S3 usage by holding some objects in memory instead. That's very different than trying to build your own object store to replace S3.

Why do all your comments seem LLM generated? You do clearly have something to contribute, but it’s probably better to just write what you’re talking about than going through a LLM.

There are more options than using S3 or completely rolling your own on JBOD. For example, you could use a cheaper S3-compatible cloud (such as Backblaze) or you can deploy a project such as Ceph.

S3 does more than 3x replica durability, as well, they use a form of erasure coding. They can lose several hard drives/servers/racks before your data becomes at risk, and have sufficient spare capacity to very quickly reproduce any missing shards before things become a problem.

That said, S3 seems like a really odd fit for their workload, plus their dependency on lifecycle rules seems utterly bizarre.

> Storage was a secondary tax. Even when processing finished in ~2 s, Lifecycle deletes meant paying for ~24 h of storage.

They decided not to implement the deletion logic in their service, so they'd just leave files sitting around for hours instead needlessly paying that storage cost? I wonder how much money they'd have saved if they just added that deletion logic.

Is spending time to optimize S3 in the manner you describe not a relevant cost?

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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

It's the government who lost 850TB of citizen data with no backups[0] Because Cloud bad.

[0] https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/the-south-korean-gove...