201–210 of 252 posts
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Which OS and FS the rust code is running on ?
No filesystem - the rust codebase directly handles the disk layout and scheduling. Our previous version of the storage layer ran on top of XFS which was probably a bad choice since we ran into a few XFS bugs along the way, but nothing serious.
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Because having your entire business model depend on the pricing whims of another business (which in the grand scheme of things is a competitor, btw) is unsustainable. Getting out of AWS is exactly the right move for Dropbox's long term health.
There are many cloud hosting providers and they are competing intensely. AWS marginal cost increase for supporting Dropbox is far below the cost of Dropbox building and maintaining their own solution. Given these facts they should be able to negotiate a far better price/cost than their current solution of building it in-house. There is nothing unique about their requirements which justify this move. It's a really wei…
The cloud is for stuff you don't care too much about.
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!
Let us hope that the IoT buzzword doesn't get abused as much as "cloud" has in the past 4-5 years.
I hope there will be no "IoT over IP"
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We have several dozen very, very good engineers working on a few discrete teams--infrastructure security, product security, etc. I don't feel comfortable getting any more specific than that; we keep security information pretty close to the vest.
To be honest, that response is less than comforting. But I understand how that'd be your answer given your position in the organization. Hopefully someone else at Dropbox feels like sharing more at some point and being more forthright about your company's practices in protecting data others entrust to them. Feel free to refer others to this thread if you think it'd be helpful.
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> Are you using spindle or ssd or flash? (admittedly I dont know if you consider flash and ssd to be the same) We have flash caches (NVMe) in the machines, but the long-term storage devices are spindle--PMR and SMR. > What is your price per GB raw? I cannot disclose, exactly, but it is well below any other public price I've seen.
So NVMe is "ready for production"? Do you think you'd use it at home, or only in the enterprise?
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To be honest, that response is less than comforting. But I understand how that'd be your answer given your position in the organization. Hopefully someone else at Dropbox feels like sharing more at some point and being more forthright about your company's practices in protecting data others entrust to them. Feel free to refer others to this thread if you think it'd be helpful.
That's disingenious. The awesome sec teams at AWS or Google are not going to review and maintain your internet-facing VM network config, which is where the real threats are. Sure, their firewalls might be a bit more robust (you don't really know, you can't see them), but anything behind them is just as insecure as you configure it yourself, and that's where penetration happens in real life. Threats at hw or kernel le…
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No filesystem - the rust codebase directly handles the disk layout and scheduling. Our previous version of the storage layer ran on top of XFS which was probably a bad choice since we ran into a few XFS bugs along the way, but nothing serious.
this is really cool! Can you give more details on how blocks, replications, metadata, etc. are being handled?
On a high level it's variable-sized blocks packed into 1GB extents, which are then aggregated into volumes and erasure coded across a set of disks on different machines/racks/rows/etc. We also replicate cross-country in addition to this. Live writes are written into non-erasure-coded volumes and encoded in the background.
The volume metadata on the disks contains enough information to be self-describing (as a safety precaution), but we also have a two-level index that maps blocks to volumes and volumes to disks.
More info to come later.
> 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…
To be fair to Backblaze this level of storage density is really only possible with recent advances in disk technology (higher densities, SMR storage, etc). Also not everyone wants to be packing a petabyte into a box. At that level of density you need to invest a lot of effort in replication strategies, tooling, network fabric etc to handle failures with high levels of availability/durability.