John Furrier and Dave Vellante, theCUBE co-hosts, were happy to accommodate Greg Duffy, CEO and Founder of Dropcam, for a short but enlightening interview at AWS re:Invent Conference in Las Vegas. Duffy was invited to talk about Dropcam and the success of his product.

“We started Dropcam to find out the answer to a very simple question: ‘What’s going on home when I’m not there?’ and it’s been a crazy journey building the ecosystem of technology required to answer that simple question.”

“We take in more videos than YouTube and we process all that video on Amazon cloud, and we built a lot of technology to deliver just the most important moments to you, and deliver it to all your viewing devices,” explained Duffy.

“This is a classic case of surveillance video where you pull in massive amounts of data or video streams,” summarized Furrier, who wanted to know more about the entire process.

“It’s not just about surveillance; people use it in their everyday lives. We have people capturing video of their families and pets, and it’s actually a lot of fun on top of being useful,” clarified Duffy.

As for the technological process, “all the video comes in through the Amazon cloud, where we run a lot of software to process, index, and store it. We have a system called Nexus that stores in a custom data structure built on top of DynamoDB and S3. We also have a custom system called Activity Recognition that tries to learn the different types of events that happen on your camera and deliver alerts only about the categories that you care about.”

“How much scale are we talking about on the video streams?” asked Furrier. “It’s petabytes every month; we process billion of events every year,” said Duffy.”It’s a huge scale.”

The videos are stored, as well as processed by Dropcam. “About 40% of our cameras are on a cloud video recording plan. That means we store either 7 or 30 days from each individual camera,” explained Greg Duffy.

The success of Dropcam took everyone by surprise. Greg started playing with surveillance cameras’ settings when his dad complained about a neighbor and his dog. He was amazed to see how many technical knowledge was required from an average user and thought about a way to automatize it into the cloud, so all an end user needs to know is his Wi-Fi password. “We didn’t anticipate that we would become the largest video service on the entire internet.”

You can read more about Greg Duffy’s Keynote presentation here.