Presenter

Bryan Field-Elliot, Chief Technology Officer, NextAlarm.com

Brian Field-Elliott is a technology architect with an emphasis on large-scale, distributed software systems.

His specialties are in security (both software/Internet security) as well as physical security (intrusion detection, physical access control, etc), and in cloud computing.

Presentation

NextView - Large-Scale Video Surveillance System Built in the Clouds

NextAlarm is a provider of security system monitoring services (burglary, fire, and medical) for homes and small businesses in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. In early 2009, NextAlarm rolled out its NextView Video Surveillance service, allowing customers to install low-cost WiFi video cameras, with complete management and off-site recording capabilities hosted by NextAlarm.

The NextView Video platform is built entirely on cloud computing principles and tools, presently hosted on the Amazon EC2 and S3 environments. The decision to fully embrace cloud computing during both the R&D phase, as well as production phase, has paid off enormously.

During the R&D phase, cloud computing allowed our R&D staff to conduct exhaustive simulations of supporting hundreds of thousands of customers, using a variety of configurations. Different server sizes (RAM and CPU), network topologies, load balancing strategies, and database tiering methods could all be tried relatively painlessly, with no capital expenditures on equipment. When the simulations ended, cloud computing allowed us to cleanly and simply decommission the virtual servers used for simulation.

Now in production use, the NextView service continues to be hosted using cloud computing. Servers, as well as 1-terabyte storage units, are activated and added to the platform quickly and easily as demand grows for the service. Costs are brought down dramatically for our service by using cloud computing, as not only are our capital expenditures significantly lower, but our staffing requirements (for maintenance of servers) are dramatically lowered as well. In this talk, we will:

1. Give an overview of the NextView video surveillance service, and a quick demonstration.
2. Give a tour of the production environment, with simple diagrams and flowcharts, describing the infrastructure and how it was built using cloud computing.
3. Discuss the R&D process, and how cloud computing tremendously lowered our barriers to entry in the market.
4. Discuss the production environment management process, and how our staff ensures maximum uptime, resilience, and scalability using cloud computing.
5. Discuss pitfalls, gotchas, and other unexpected turns of events during both pre- and post-rollout. Things to watch out for when basing a major new initiative on cloud computer. Things no one had considered ahead of time.
6. 6. Discuss the economies of large-scale cloud computing infrastructure, and our financial model for deciding when, if ever, to "pull the rug" and build our own infrastructure internally rather than relying upon an outsourced cloud computing provider (currently Amazon).