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.
Not if the people switching is the cool crowd. Which is exactly what I think is happening here
Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy
21–30 of 243 posts
Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy
#22Who 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.
I've admired Drew and the early Dropbox team for getting things done and shipped even when compiled python GUIs was edgy as the initial Rails version of Twitter was. But they shipped and validated the market. Now adding all those fancy and cool tech mentioned in the blog post will increase the complexity by a lot but it's not clear what are the real benefits. Does a decreased number of machines running really justify the migration and addition of complexity? Maybe they have some new products in the pipeline that built upon the new stack. Or they waste their time. We will see.
Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy
#23Who 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.
I noticed on social media a lot of negativity toward Dropbox and sometimes even on HN. The negative sentiment appears to come from tech circles who feel One Drive offers a better price point or iCloud works great for them, so Dropbox shouldn't exist.
Personally, I prefer Dropbox. I found problems with One Drive. Google Drive client was always hit and miss and I could not rely on it. iCloud is not cross platform (afaik). Dropbox has worked where ever I needed it.
Dropbox is more expensive but I prefer to have my files in Dropbox (as a separation of concerns) rather than have a single tech company control every aspect of my life.
My experience with the 'average Joe' is that Dropbox is easy and it works. Yes, they might save a couple dollars switching to OneDrive but Dropbox still offer a good product. Will Dropbox survive long term? I certainly hope so. I have no affiliation, aside from being a customer.
Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy
#24One thing nice about OpenResty (nginx) and their Lua support is that it plugs in at TLS negotiation. Does Envoy?
Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy
#25I'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-...
We do have some local patches as well (mostly for integration with out own infrastructure - stats collection, some RPC specific stuff). As SaveTheRbtz mentioned we encountered some issues with non-RFC clients, corner cases which were not exposed when envoy is used in "trusted" environment, etc., but all our fixes are now in upstream, so next migrations will be way easier both for us and for other envoy users.
Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy
#26Did you consider using commercial nginx? If so, what made you decide against it?
The price is really insane for Nginx commercial.
Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy
#27Did you consider using commercial nginx? If so, what made you decide against it?
Sadly, it would probably be as hard to maintain as an opensource version. We really want to have access to the code to make sure we can fix, troubleshoot it, understand it fast...
Things that may've help:
-- Configuration definition (e.g. protobufs.)
-- More focus on observability: error metrics (instead of logs), tracing, etc.
-- gRPC control plane.
-- C++ module development SDK.
-- (ideally) bazel.
Some dataplane features like gRPC JSON transcoding, gRPC-Web, and http/2 to backends.
Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy
#28Who 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.
I noticed on social media a lot of negativity toward Dropbox and sometimes even on HN. The negative sentiment appears to come from tech circles who feel One Drive offers a better price point or iCloud works great for them, so Dropbox shouldn't exist. Personally, I prefer Dropbox. I found problems with One Drive. Google Drive client was always hit and miss and I could not rely on it. iCloud is not cross platform (afai…
I don't use Google Drive per say, since I run Linux. I primarily use rclone and previously had issues with Dropbox throttling uploads as well. Currently I pay $12 a month and get unlimited storage with G Suite. In addition to all the other G Suite features, Dropbox doesn't offer anything close in terms of price or features.
Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy
#29A shame they picked nginx in the first place, it has all the stats and critical features behind the paid edition. HAProxy is always a better choice for load balancing.
Besides that, it looks like the move was significantly driven by GRPC and profobuf. No surprise here, GRPC really doesn't work well over HTTP. Once a company start using the google stack, they have to move to more of the google stack to make it usable.
Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy
#30One thing nice about OpenResty (nginx) and their Lua support is that it plugs in at TLS negotiation. Does Envoy?
Can you describe your use-case?
If you are talking about the ability to select a certificate on the fly via `ssl_certificate_by_lua_block`[1] we are not aware of such functionality. If you are missing something, I would highly encourage you discuss it with the community on a github!
From Oleg Guba, Traffic Team TL, co-author, and person driving the deployment:
* ListenerFilters + NetworkFilters are flexible enough, that some of the custom logic could be just moved to the config.
From Ruslan Nigmatullin, our head Envoy developer:
If you are talking more about a custom verification code there is already couple of ways to do that:
* Client TLS auth Network Filter: https://www.envoyproxy.io/docs/envoy/latest/configuration/li...
* Alternatively, if you are writing C++ extension you can use Network::ReadFilter, Network::ConnectionCallbacks.
[1] https://github.com/openresty/lua-nginx-module#ssl_certificat... [2] https://github.com/openresty/lua-resty-core/blob/master/lib/...