Writing January 2, 2017 · 2 min read

Early Impressions of AWS Rekognition

A few weeks back now [I wrote an article] (http://localhost:1313/blog/reducing-false-positives-use-AWS-Rekognition/) about how I was using the newly released (at Re: Invent) AWS Rekognition service. Since then I’ve been asked by numerous people if I would write a follow-up article on my impressions and (most importantly) costs.

Costs

I know that this is what most folks are interested in, so I’ll start here. Before I jump into what it cost me to run this service, I think it’s important to take these numbers with a grain of salt. I didn’t write down exactly when I enabled the service, but I’m pretty sure it ran for roughly three weeks in December 2016. I’ll repost the full costs for January 2017.

Total cost for the solution was $23.19 USD.

Here’s the breakdown of the cost by AWS Service:

Lambda: $0
Simple Storage Service (S3): $4.24
Rekognition: $18.95

Below I’ve included screen grabs of the three services from my billing console:

Lambda Costs

S3 Costs

Rekognition Costs

The solution processed a total of 23,951 CCTV images. So that means that it cost approximately $0.00098622 per image processed. Not bad eh?

Notifications

I’m a huge fan of Slack, but in this case, I’m not sure if it’s the correct solution. I consider the images that I’m processing to be private, which means I don’t want them to be publicly visible. To present images in Slack, I need to generate pre-signed URLs which expire after a certain length of time. If you’re in Slack all day, that’s not a problem, but if you do walk away for a bit, you could potentially miss images. I’m working on a solution for this now.

Tuning of the CCTV system

I ended up sending quite a lot of images to S3 for processing. Probably much, much more that I needed to. I’m going to spend some time in January fine-tuning the motion capture setup for Security Spy as well as creating a simple logging system to gather more statistics about the solution.

Serverless FTW

When I talk to customers about serverless solutions on AWS they immediately want to talk about Lambda. It’s very easy to forget about all the other serverless (managed) services that AWS offers. I built this system on a cold Sunday afternoon using three services: S3, Rekognition, and Lambda. All of which are serverless, which means I don’t have to manage a single OS. That’s a huge win in my books!