Case Study: Dropcam achieves ultra-scalable, low-latency video streaming and storage with Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Dropcam - Customer Case Study

Dropcam, a San Francisco startup that provides HD video monitoring hardware and cloud services for consumers and small businesses, faced major scaling challenges as customers generated up to 100 GB of video data per month. Its in‑house storage system was time consuming to maintain, and onboarding new servers through a managed host took about 24 hours, limiting the company’s ability to grow and innovate.

Dropcam migrated to AWS using Amazon S3 for storage, Amazon EC2 for compute, and Amazon DynamoDB for scalable metadata and throughput, switching customers to the cloud in stages to avoid interruptions. The move cut video‑event delivery latency from 5–10 seconds to under 50 milliseconds, enabled automated, minute‑scale server provisioning (about 125 instances running and new ones launched weekly), supported real‑time computer‑vision processing, and reduced costs with 3‑year Reserved Instances (about a 67% discount).

Dropcam

Greg Nelson

Vice President, Software Engineering