First published on rutba.io .

A handful of cameras is a product you buy. A hundred and fifty, writing terabytes a day, is an operations problem, and it fails the same ways each time. The disks fill and recording silently stops. The event database bloats until queries time out. A camera's clock drifts and its footage stops counting as evidence. And one box is the whole system, so one failure is an outage. Rutba Vision is built around those failures, and this is how.

The same software at every size

Every machine runs the same node agent, and a site's nodes take three roles. Edge nodes hold the cameras: the relay keeps the only connection to each camera and fans it out to the recorder, live view, detection and RTSP out. Analysis nodes run the AI and codec work, and are added as the analytics grow. The core runs the Vision Bus, the index, the API and the console. A branch with a handful of cameras runs all three roles on one machine, and a large warehouse spreads them over several.…