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Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

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Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#11

Post by LeifCarrotson »

gshx wrote: post #7
planetjones wrote: post #4

Oh dear I didn't realise Dropbox had invested all of that time and money moving into their own data centre. From my perspective the future of Dropbox looks bleak. Mass storage with Amazon is much cheaper [edit: from a consumer perspective]. I know Dropbox has superior software that works (as opposed to the poor apps by Amazon and Google) but I imagine a lot of people are like me i.e. Store most of the stuff at the ch…

Not at all, cost/TB of S3 is much higher compared to what you can build provided you know how to build it yourself.

And provided your management costs are lower than Amazon's profit on S3.

There's an infection point somewhere at which owning your own hardware and paying someone to acquire, build, manage, and maintain it becomes cheaper than renting from someone who does the same thing at scale and makes a profit off of it.

Dropbox is probably there, but many small web apps are not.

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#12

Post by hakcermani »

Its an amazing remarkable feat indeed to move all those bits live to another location ! But seems contrary to what Netflix did (move everything to AWS ! - http://www.eweek.com/cloud/netflix-now-running-its-movies-ex...) I guess they have their specific usage and reasons ?

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#13

Post by beachstartup »

planetjones wrote: post #6
jamwt wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh dear I didn't realise Dropbox had invested all of that time and money moving into their own data centre. We've had our own datacenters for a very long time; this project just represents moving "blob storage" into our own datacenter rather than just metadata. > Mass storage with Amazon is much cheaper As the article says, in Dropbox's particular case this is very untrue. Although I agree with your general point t…

Sorry I think you misunderstand me. Technically it sounds like a great achievement. Well done! Ending badly I mean that in 5 years time Dropbox will be left with a load of servers and a business model in tatters. It's the economics I think will end badly Also I am sure the in house data centre looks cheaper to Dropbox - but now they have their own hardware on the balance sheet. But I meant cheaper from a consumer poi…

> but now they have their own hardware on the balance sheet

i don't know if this is true or not, but it isn't at all necessary.

you can just buy everything on an operating lease for a fraction of what amazon or any other provider charges and write the payment off without any sort of depreciation schedule or hit to your cash or unnecessarily grow the balance sheet/liabilities.

how do you think it's possible that you can easily get a $15/month dedicated server?

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#14

Post by jamwt »

hakcermani wrote: post #12

Its an amazing remarkable feat indeed to move all those bits live to another location ! But seems contrary to what Netflix did (move everything to AWS ! - http://www.eweek.com/cloud/netflix-now-running-its-movies-ex... ) I guess they have their specific usage and reasons ?

Both companies control the technology that most impacts their business.

Dropbox stores quite a bit more data than Netflix. Data storage is our business. Ergo, we control storage hardware.

On the other hand, Netflix pushes quite a bit more bandwidth than almost everyone, including us. Ergo, Netflix tightly manages their CDN. That's where they really focus their technical work. Their storage footprint is smaller and less important to optimize to the extreme.

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#15

Post by beachstartup »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #10
gshx wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all, cost/TB of S3 is much higher compared to what you can build provided you know how to build it yourself.

And provided your management costs are lower than Amazon's profit on S3. There's an infection point somewhere at which owning your own hardware and paying someone to acquire, build, manage, and maintain it becomes cheaper than renting from someone who does the same thing at scale and makes a profit off of it. Dropbox is probably there, but many small web apps are not.

it's entirely dependent on whether or not you know what the hell you're doing in a datacenter. if you don't know what you're doing, you'll never hit any such point.

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#16

Post by planetjones »

beachstartup wrote: post #13
planetjones wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry I think you misunderstand me. Technically it sounds like a great achievement. Well done! Ending badly I mean that in 5 years time Dropbox will be left with a load of servers and a business model in tatters. It's the economics I think will end badly Also I am sure the in house data centre looks cheaper to Dropbox - but now they have their own hardware on the balance sheet. But I meant cheaper from a consumer poi…

> but now they have their own hardware on the balance sheet i don't know if this is true or not, but it isn't at all necessary. you can just buy everything on an operating lease for a fraction of what amazon or any other provider charges and write the payment off without any sort of depreciation schedule or hit to your cash or unnecessarily grow the balance sheet/liabilities. how do you think it's possible that you c…

> how do you think it's possible that you can easily get a $15/month dedicated server?

Sorry makes no sense to me.

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#17

Post by dikaiosune »

jamwt wrote: post #2

Hi HN! A couple of us from the Magic Pocket software team are around to answer questions if anyone has some.

The article makes a brief mention of Go causing issues with RAM usage. Was this due to large heap usage, or was it a problem of GC pressure/throughput/latency? If the former, what were some of the core problems that could not be further optimized in Go? If the latter, I've heard recent versions have had some significant improvements -- has your team looked at that and thought that you would have been OK if you just waited, or was there a fundamental gap that GC improvements couldn't close?

Could you comment more generally on what advantages Rust offered and where your team would like to see improvement? Are there portions of the Dropbox codebase where you'd love to use Rust but can't until RFCs/lands/hits stable? Are there portions where the decision to use Rust caused complications or problems?

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#19

Post by iofj »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #10
gshx wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all, cost/TB of S3 is much higher compared to what you can build provided you know how to build it yourself.

And provided your management costs are lower than Amazon's profit on S3. There's an infection point somewhere at which owning your own hardware and paying someone to acquire, build, manage, and maintain it becomes cheaper than renting from someone who does the same thing at scale and makes a profit off of it. Dropbox is probably there, but many small web apps are not.

Keep in mind that that doesn't just result in more costs : it results in limits on scaling.

Suppose you are on S3 and you can serve a customer x Mb/$. Now you're limited to products that you can charge more for. Suppose you get data served to customers on dedicated at x/10 Mb/$ (easily doable, and compared to S3 I bet x/50 would be doable).

Isn't this how products like facebook video, vimeo (and thousands of porn sites) survive ? If you calculate how much it would cost to serve 20 Mb out from EC2, you would never ever be able to pay that using advertising revenue, even if you got as much as TV gets.

So that reduction in price that comes from not using the cloud doesn't just go into your pocket : it enables new business models that just aren't accessible to you otherwise.

Also can we stop pretending that the alternative to the cloud is buying servers from HP and colocate them ? That's simply not true. There's any number of projects that would enable you to slowly scale up that aren't EC2. It's more work, certainly. But it's worth it at quite small scales.

And in some ways (e.g. geographic reach) clouds simply don't match existing dedicated offerings. Not now, and at a 20% yearly price reduction it'll take them decades to match dedicated server rental.

Obviously I'm not claiming clouds don't have advantages. But you're paying quite a high price for them atm.

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