Supernova Award Category
The Problem
Due to the nature of Camio’s product, it's compute-intensive, and the company needed the necessary infrastructure to process massive amounts of video files that could be analyzed and accessed on a moment’s notice. Furthermore, the company's MVP was built prior to its first round of funding in 2014 and only has 10 employees. With limited manpower and resources, Camio needed to focus less time, money and energy on infrastructure development and support, and more time on developing and perfecting the product offering.
The Solution
Since workloads, traffic and storage requirements were expected to fluctuate unpredictably at first, Google Cloud Platform infrastructure seemed to be the best option because it would allow Camio to scale on a moment's notice and grow without overpaying for server capacity when workloads fluctuated at different times of the day and with different regional weather patterns. Since the Camio team isn't staffed with site reliability engineers, they needed something they could implement and forget about, while focusing on product development. For this reason, Camio selected Google App Engine for its fully-managed PaaS service, Google Compute Engine for Managed VM capabilities and larger workloads, Google Cloud Storage and Google Datastore for maximized storage, Google BigQuery for data processing and analysis, and Google Cloud Monitoring—nearly every Google Cloud Platform service offered for compute, big data, storage and networking.
The results
Since implementing Cloud Platform, Camio is no longer spending valuable time and resources chasing down deployment scripts or maintaining server instances. Its infrastructure is literally maintenance free, enabling the team to focus on more important initiatives such as product development and sales. With Cloud Platform infrastructure, Camio has been able to scale to analyze and rank 32 million video events in its first year alone. With tremendous growth, Camio paid for workloads matching its peaks and valleys as they happened. With Google Cloud Storage, they reduced video storage costs by 7x while retaining indexing advantages of Cloud Datastore for their 22 Terabytes of meta-data. BigQuery enabled the team to perform ad hoc queries on meta-data without writing and maintaining extract and transform mappers.
Metrics
Camio processes more images in one day than Pinterest did in its first year. When it launched in March, Camio cited 32 million events in a matter of a month. The productivity and cost savings in their first year amounted to $300K. Cloud Platform’s impressive storage, processing speeds and infrastructure support helped make that possible.
The Technology
App Engine allows Camio to build on customizable infrastructure that can scale up to billions of requests per day and automatically scale down if traffic subsides. In addition, Compute Engine was used to create a flexible, fluid infrastructure while having complete control over its Python VMs. Cloud Storage and Cloud Datastore maximize storage, and BigQuery streamlines data processing and analysis. Google Cloud Platform frees Camio from having to plan, operate and maintain infrastructure.
Disruptive Factor
Camio is the first to make video monitoring simple and accessible to everyone. Its first-ever smart, mobile video monitoring service instantly distills millions of hours of real-time video into the moments that matter to provide peace of mind to pet parents, family members, home caregivers, business owners, homeowners and many others. The processing speed, storage and analysis of massive amounts of video would not be possible at scale without Google Cloud Platform. Having built in the cloud from the ground up, Camio iterates quickly to improve its machine learning algorithms without having to worry about infrastructure, overpaying for storage or delayed response times. Implementing flexible and fluid cloud infrastructure has allowed a small team of 10 to save time and energy otherwise spent on administrative and maintenance tasks, providing more time for product development and innovation.
Shining Moment
With Cloud Platform infrastructure, Camio has been able to scale to analyze and rank 32 million video events in its first year alone. Camio processes more images in one day than Pinterest did in its first year. When it launched in March, Camio cited 32 million events in a matter of a month. The productivity and cost savings in their first year amounted to $300K. Cloud Platform’s impressive storage, processing speeds and infrastructure support helped make that possible.