Methods and systems for deploying a video analytics system include determining one or more applications for a security system in an environment, including one or more constraints. Each functional module in a directed graph representation of one or more applications is profiled to generate one or more configurations for each functional module. The nodes of each graph representation represent functional modules of the respective application, and repeated module configurations are skipped. Resource usage for each of the one or more applications is estimated using the one or more configurations of each functional module and the one or more constraints. The one or more applications are deployed in the environment.