A little about Dropcam's cloud service on AWS, and some things about our experience with DynamoDB (The Good, The Bad*, and the Ugly).

1. Dropcam
and NoSQL on AWS
Greg Nelson
Thursday, September 5, 13

2. What is Dropcam?
• Software company in SF
• Wi-Fi enabled camera
• Intelligent motion detection
• Apps (iPhone, iPad,Android,Web)
• CloudVideo Recording service
Thursday, September 5, 13

3. Dropcam Uses
just because
(Pleasant Hill, CA - burglar caught)
small business
(The Baconery, NYC)
home security
(Toyota dealer saw I-5 bridge collapse)
(Kyra, N.Virginia)
baby
(Chris W, Pittsburgh, PA)
pets
(Dropcam employee, yesterday)
family
Thursday, September 5, 13

4. Oh $#%!
2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
Switch to
DynamoDB
Thursday, September 5, 13

5. Oh $#%!
2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
Switch to
DynamoDB
•More inbound thanYouTube
Thursday, September 5, 13

6. Oh $#%!
2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
Switch to
DynamoDB
•More inbound thanYouTube
•Suddenly petabytes
Thursday, September 5, 13

7. Dropcam on AWS
DynamoDB
Nexus Web Platform
S3
Cameras Users
Thursday, September 5, 13

8. DynamoDB
at Dropcam
• CVR metadata
• recording sessions
• cuepoints
• And other stuff (user sessions, etc.)
Thursday, September 5, 13

9. The Good
• NoSQL as-a-service
• Fast
• Predictable
• Scalable
• Highly available
Thursday, September 5, 13

10. The Bad**Actually good
• “Eventual consistency”
• Design for sharding (hash key)
• Schemaless, sorta
• Limited query-ability
• NOT a replacement for your RDBMS
Thursday, September 5, 13

11. The Ugly
• Think in IOs
• Actually, think in IOPS (harder)
• Get throttled and you’ll have a bad time
• Sort only by range key (even on scan)
• Can’t update range key
• No empty values?
Thursday, September 5, 13

12. Questions?
Thank you!
By the way:
https://www.dropcam.com/jobs
jobs@dropcam.com
Thursday, September 5, 13