Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy • Hacker News Board

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#11

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 9:58 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#12

Post by SaveTheRbtz » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 10:06 PM UTC

caiobegotti wrote: post #10

I'm positively surprised that Dropbox (at least from what I understood from the post) didn't require lots of changes or patches on top of the upstream codebase of Envoy to migrate their traffic!

We did require some of them[1]. Esp. painful were Transfer-Encoding quirks, and some dances around old HTTP/1.0 backends and request buffering.

Compared to NGINX though, it was relatively easy to push these fixes upstream. Community is very welcoming to outside contributions.

[1] https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/how-we-migrated-dropbox-...

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#13

Post by nine_k » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 10:29 PM UTC

Thaxll wrote: post #9

Havoc wrote: post #3

Sensing a bit of a trend here. Didn't another major player recently make the same switch?

It's a drop in the water compared to Nginx usage.

Because most nginx usage is different?

Of course, you can serve static assets using Envoy, and maybe even connect a fascgi app without very much hassle. But it's quite a bit less straightforward.

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#14

Post by SaveTheRbtz » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 10:30 PM UTC

Thaxll wrote: post #9

Havoc wrote: post #3

Sensing a bit of a trend here. Didn't another major player recently make the same switch?

It's a drop in the water compared to Nginx usage.

That is indeed true. But, I remember the time when we were rolling out nginx back in 2000's and exactly the same thing was said about Apache.

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#15

Post by techntoke » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 10:32 PM UTC

Who does Dropbox compete with these days? They have pretty much the highest prices for the least amount of value. The only reason I see them mentioned here frequently is their connection with Y Combinator.

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#16

Post by greymalik » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 10:33 PM UTC

techntoke wrote: post #15

Who does Dropbox compete with these days? They have pretty much the highest prices for the least amount of value. The only reason I see them mentioned here frequently is their connection with Y Combinator.

Google and Apple, to start.

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#17

Post by stock_toaster » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 10:36 PM UTC

SaveTheRbtz wrote: post #4

Havoc wrote: post #3

Sensing a bit of a trend here. Didn't another major player recently make the same switch?

I think the best slice of who's migrating to Envoy can be observed via EnvoyCon talks[1][2]: * Lyft (of course) * Spotify * Stripe * Square * eBay * Yelp * Pinterest Plus the support from major cloud providers: Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. [1] https://envoyconna18.sched.com/ [2] https://envoycon2019.sched.com/

So, seems like nginx is fine until your company reaches the "we are worth billions now" scale?

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#18

Post by mperham » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 10:37 PM UTC

Did you consider using commercial nginx? If so, what made you decide against it?

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#19

Post by stock_toaster » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 10:40 PM UTC

Thaxll wrote: post #9

Havoc wrote: post #3

Sensing a bit of a trend here. Didn't another major player recently make the same switch?

It's a drop in the water compared to Nginx usage.

HAProxy is pretty popular too.

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#20

Post by techntoke » Thu, Jul 30, 2020, 10:45 PM UTC

greymalik wrote: post #16

techntoke wrote: post #15

Who does Dropbox compete with these days? They have pretty much the highest prices for the least amount of value. The only reason I see them mentioned here frequently is their connection with Y Combinator.

Google and Apple, to start.

They don't compete though. Google offers 17+GB free with email, office suite, unlimited photos, drive and Voice with a free number for unlimited calling and texting. Dropbox has much stricter bandwidth limits as well.

For $9.99 you get all that plus 2TB storage with Google One. Dropbox has a minimum for of 3 users for their business plan, but with 1 user on G Suite for $12/mo I get unlimited storage and all the Goodies I mentioned before.