The word "cloud" loses all meaning in this article. "The irony is that in fleeing the cloud, Dropbox is showing why the cloud is so powerful. It too is building infrastructure so that others don’t have to. It too is, well, a cloud company." Wait ... so using AWS is "cloud", having your own servers is "cloud" too. Everything is cloudy!
Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud
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Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud
#112Hi HN! A couple of us from the Magic Pocket software team are around to answer questions if anyone has some.
Does magic pocket use any non-standard error-correction algorithms, or just parity-style RAID5 or 6?
The data placement isn't RAID. We encode aggregated extents of data in "volumes" that are placed on a random set of storage nodes (with sufficient physical diversity and various other constraints). Each storage node might hold a few thousand volumes, but the placement for each volume is independent of the others on the disk. If one disk fails we can thus reconstruct those volumes from hundreds of other disks simultaneously, unlike in RAID where you'd be limited in IOPS and network bandwidth to a fixed set of disks in the RAID array.
That probably sounded confusing but it's a good topic for a blog post once we get around to it.
Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud
#113Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud
#114>> Transferring four petabytes of data, it turned out, took about a day. 46GB/s, is my math right?
We were pushing over a terabit of data transfer at peak, so 4-5PB per day.
Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good questions, let me try to tackle them one by one. > 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? The reasons for using rust were many, but memory was one of them. Primarily, for this particular project, the…
How do you do network io with rust? Thread-per-connection, non-blocking (using mio or?), or something else?
Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud
#116I want to point out one other thing about this project, if only to assuage my guilt. And this community of hackers and entrepreneurs seems as good a place as any to clear the air. There is a necessary abridgement that happens in media like this, wherein a few individuals in lead roles act as a vignette for the entire effort. In particular, on the software team, James and I are highlighted here, and it would be easy t…
Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud
#117I want to point out one other thing about this project, if only to assuage my guilt. And this community of hackers and entrepreneurs seems as good a place as any to clear the air. There is a necessary abridgement that happens in media like this, wherein a few individuals in lead roles act as a vignette for the entire effort. In particular, on the software team, James and I are highlighted here, and it would be easy t…
Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud
#118I want to point out one other thing about this project, if only to assuage my guilt. And this community of hackers and entrepreneurs seems as good a place as any to clear the air. There is a necessary abridgement that happens in media like this, wherein a few individuals in lead roles act as a vignette for the entire effort. In particular, on the software team, James and I are highlighted here, and it would be easy t…
What does SRE mean?
Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rarely do people "get" that if you have a consistent workload or resource need, AWS is more expensive than your own gear.
But presumably Amazon benefits (saves money) from making more use of hardware resources. It has to have some spare, but not as much spare as a comparable group of non-AWS users would have in total.... Also, presumably, not all the AWS users are awake at the same time ;-)
yeah, they sure do.
Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud
#120I want to point out one other thing about this project, if only to assuage my guilt. And this community of hackers and entrepreneurs seems as good a place as any to clear the air. There is a necessary abridgement that happens in media like this, wherein a few individuals in lead roles act as a vignette for the entire effort. In particular, on the software team, James and I are highlighted here, and it would be easy t…
What does SRE mean?