Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud • Hacker News Board

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#121

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Mar 14, 2016, 9:49 PM UTC

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 ?

[deleted]

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#122

Post by yardie » Mon, Mar 14, 2016, 9:50 PM UTC

jamwt wrote: post #107

ju-st wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In datacenters space is cheap in comparison to power so often it's simply not economical to cram more in less space.

Sometimes; but depreciation costs are usually more than either of those (for storage).

Did you build your own centers? Running our hosting we had far more constraints on our power than anything else. Even though we only had 20U of equipment we ended up taking a 44u rack. Our disk arrays being the largest consumers. This made the case for moving to SSDs even stronger.

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#123

Post by jamwt » Mon, Mar 14, 2016, 9:51 PM UTC

rbranson wrote: post #81

james_cowling wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, Dropbox Infra is mostly a Go shop. It's our primary development language and we don't plan to switch off any time soon. We're always about the right tool for the job tho, and there are definitely use cases where Rust makes a lot of sense. We've been really happy with it so far.

Curious about the specifics with how you interfaced Go with Rust.

Right now, they talk over RPC. In the future, we might embed Rust libraries as C libraries into go and other languages.

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#124

Post by jamwt » Mon, Mar 14, 2016, 9:54 PM UTC

iskander wrote: post #113

Q: Did the Dropbox devs working on the second version of Magic Pocket encounter any language stability issues with Rust? Did updates to the core language ever break existing code?

We probably "pulled forward" every two months or so. Back in early 2015, sometimes we'd have breakages that took a bit of work to remedy. But post 1.0, the language has been very stable.

As usual, we actually have more challenges pulling the libraries forward than the language.

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#125

Post by jclaybaugh » Mon, Mar 14, 2016, 9:55 PM UTC

dikaiosune wrote: post #118

curyous wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does SRE mean?

I assume Site Reliability Engineer from the last time I looked at their openings. I didn't look at the description, but I assume it's a more formal description for devops?

devops is not a job title. It is a way of doing things.

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#126

Post by photonwins » Mon, Mar 14, 2016, 9:59 PM UTC

I am curious to know, with so many disks densely packed in a 4U configuration, I am guessing there is definitely increased heat generation and not to mention vibration. How do you handle these? Also, does it have any effect on MTBF?

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#127

Post by Sanddancer » Mon, Mar 14, 2016, 10:05 PM UTC

riobard wrote: post #37

> Measuring only one-and-half-feet by three-and-half-feet by six inches, each Diskotech box holds as much as a petabyte of data This number is very interesting. Basically Diskotech stores 1PB in 18" × 6" × 42" = 4,536 cubic inch volume, which is 10% bigger than standard 7U (17" × 12.2" × 19.8" = 4,107 cubic inch). 124 days ago Dropbox Storage Engineer jamwt posted here ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10541052…

Not to knock Dropbox's engineering, because it is sexy, but there are off the shelf enclosures right now that will fit 90 drives in a 4u case. Given that said enclosures have full rack rails and all, and are narrower, I don't doubt that a more densely designed server is feasible in the least with dropbox's design.

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#128

Post by jimbokun » Mon, Mar 14, 2016, 10:07 PM UTC

barkingcat wrote: post #72

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!

Was discussing "in the cloud" with my wife yesterday, and I said "It just means on some company's servers." Which suddenly de-mystified the whole concept for her.

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#129

Post by debaserab2 » Mon, Mar 14, 2016, 10:15 PM UTC

jclaybaugh wrote: post #125

dikaiosune wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume Site Reliability Engineer from the last time I looked at their openings. I didn't look at the description, but I assume it's a more formal description for devops?

devops is not a job title. It is a way of doing things.

Except it is actually a job title at all sorts of places.

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#130

Post by Sanddancer » Mon, Mar 14, 2016, 10:15 PM UTC

jl6 wrote: post #53

jamwt wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference to get even higher is our system supports host-managed SMR disks that come in 10T and 14T sizes.

I've never heard of a 14TB disk drive. Is that what you mean? Who makes these?

10 TB drives can be gotten off the shelf -- http://www.hgst.com/products/hard-drives/ultrastar-he10 -- and 14 TB drives are probably in the state of availability for large customers; it's not unusual for drive makers to make available drives coming down the pipe to certain customers.