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Dropbox traffic infrastructure: Edge network

blogs.dropbox.com

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Re: Dropbox traffic infrastructure: Edge network

#31

Post by microtonal »

callumjones wrote: post #29
rakoo wrote: post #3

Who would have thought a simple FTP-on-some-server would have been so complicated. Thanks for the post! I'm eagerly waiting for the blog post about how bazel and torrents are used.

This has to be HN at its worst. Reducing a complicated file sharing and collaboration tool to an insecure and highly technical protocol. Dropbox: I can upload a file super easily and share a simple & secure link with someone who just has a web browser. FTP: I can upload a file to an FTP server I've either configured on my server or rented online. I'll then provide an FTP url to friend with instructions on how they sh…

This is a parody. From the original Dropbox announcement on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Unfortunately, similar parodies are posted as a reaction to many Dropbox-related posts, so gets a bit repetitive.

Re: Dropbox traffic infrastructure: Edge network

#32

Post by manfredo »

callumjones wrote: post #29
rakoo wrote: post #3

Who would have thought a simple FTP-on-some-server would have been so complicated. Thanks for the post! I'm eagerly waiting for the blog post about how bazel and torrents are used.

This has to be HN at its worst. Reducing a complicated file sharing and collaboration tool to an insecure and highly technical protocol. Dropbox: I can upload a file super easily and share a simple & secure link with someone who just has a web browser. FTP: I can upload a file to an FTP server I've either configured on my server or rented online. I'll then provide an FTP url to friend with instructions on how they sh…

It's probably in reference to a HN comment on Dropbox's original announcement post that said the product was a glorified version of Rsync. To be fair to that commenter, he congratualted the company in it's IPO post.

Re: Dropbox traffic infrastructure: Edge network

#34

Post by dsl »

zimbatm wrote: post #25
anonacct37 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had to guess the people who wrote this are just assuming tls on top.

That's an interesting implication. If they distribute the same cert so widely geographically, any host country could technically request it for "lawful intercepts".

You don't have to keep keys on boxes in random countries if you use a TLS oracle [1]. Another option is deploying the keys onto an HSM and pointing your frontends at that.

1. Here is CloudFlare's implementation (and pats themselves on the back for "inventing" it): https://blog.cloudflare.com/keyless-ssl-the-nitty-gritty-tec...

Re: Dropbox traffic infrastructure: Edge network

#35

Post by romed »

zimbatm wrote: post #25
anonacct37 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had to guess the people who wrote this are just assuming tls on top.

That's an interesting implication. If they distribute the same cert so widely geographically, any host country could technically request it for "lawful intercepts".

A host country can request a lawful intercept regardless of whatever technical conditions exist on your network.

Re: Dropbox traffic infrastructure: Edge network

#38

Post by wongarsu »

acdha wrote: post #15
wmf wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cynical HN commenters from a decade ago. It's pretty hilarious in retrospect.

Oh, right, I'd forgotten about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 It's definitely comical in retrospect for not even understanding the state of the technology at the time.

I know the comment is today taken as the high of HN negativity, but to me the comment seems very reasonable.

- Back then there were FTP clients that automatically kept server and client in sync, which is the main feature of Dropbox. Dropbox adds a website, but Windows Explorer already supports FTP nativly. Of course easily creating shared links turned out to be a major thing, but I don't think we can blame people for not predicting that (especially since public folders are a feature of FTP servers, so it's not a new feature, just a lot more convinience). And of course Dropbox makes all that convinient and approachable, but that's easily overlooked by the technical user.

- The comment points out that contrary to the headline Dropbox will not replace USB drives. And here we are, a decade later, and Dropbox indeed didn't replace USB drives.

Of course in hindsight it's clear that Dropbox was a great idea with great execution, but that wasn't obvious at the time at all.

Re: Dropbox traffic infrastructure: Edge network

#39

Post by mrkurt »

meritt wrote: post #7

I wonder which definition of "Edge" is going to win out because right now it's being used interchangeably to mean either: 1) CDN or 2) On-premise machines/IoT.

Those aren't completely distinct. We've started calling the edge everything between app servers and user devices. The boundary is "where your users are in control", but the edge itself is pretty fat.

Re: Dropbox traffic infrastructure: Edge network

#40

Post by wongarsu »

meritt wrote: post #16
acdha wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard it used with that second definition. It's pretty consistently used to refer to running close to the user, as opposed to having a big data center which most of your users aren't near. The second definition could be a confusion of ownership — i.e. are you paying a CDN to do higher-level service or running the services yourself?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_computing Wikipedia's definition primarily focuses on the local/IoT version as a distinctly different from utilizing a CDN.

I wouldn't define a CDN as edge computing either, since computation is not the purpose of a CDN.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network contains

> Most CDN providers will provide their services over a varying, defined, set of PoPs [...]. These sets of PoPs can be called "edges", "edge nodes" or "edge networks" as they would be the closest edge of CDN assets to the end user"

There's also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_device which uses yet another idea of what The Edge is (in this case routers to a bigger network)

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