Case Study: Dropcam achieves ultra-scalable, low-latency video streaming with Amazon DynamoDB

Dropcam - Customer Case Study

Dropcam, the San Francisco startup behind cloud-connected video monitoring hardware and software, was struggling to scale its storage and server infrastructure as data grew to 100 GB per customer each month. Its in-house storage approach was time-consuming, and onboarding new servers through its managed hosting provider could take nearly 24 hours, making rapid growth difficult. Dropcam turned to Amazon DynamoDB as part of its AWS-based stack, alongside Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3.

Amazon DynamoDB helped Dropcam scale and maintain throughput without having to build and manage database sharding itself. The company reported that video event delivery time dropped from 5–10 seconds to under 50 milliseconds, while consistent low-latency performance supported growth in connected cameras. With Amazon DynamoDB and AWS, Dropcam also eliminated the need for a larger operations team and could launch new servers in minutes instead of a day.

Dropcam

Greg Duffy

Chief Executive Officer