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Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

dropbox.tech

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Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#181

Post by elithrar »

eric4smith wrote: post #104

It's interesting almost no web server provides an easy way to deal with multi-tenant multi-domain architectures in a good way that includes automatic SSL. Caddy is the closest, but still not near enough. There is this small segment of the market that we operate in that requires thousands of TLS connected domains to be hosted behind a dynamic backend. It's services like Tumblr, Wordpress.com, or any other hosting serv…

You can definitely “lazy load” TLS certs into Envoy.

The SDS (Secrets Discovery Service) supports this, and is touched on in TFA: https://www.envoyproxy.io/docs/envoy/latest/intro/arch_overv...

You provide a gRPC service that can return the keypair needed for any host, with host config also being dynamic.

https://www.envoyproxy.io/docs/envoy/latest/configuration/se...

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#182

Post by chii »

mehrdada wrote: post #146
pjmlp wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When supermarkets and landlords start accepting them, then yes.

Could it be that OSS is simply not a sustainable business model for the long haul and it was simply successful in a period of history when vast money was made quickly by landgrab expansion of technology to consolidate/provide many basic services and the code itself wasn’t the competitive differentiator? I don’t know but that’s a possibility too. I question why one would be concerned in keeping OSS alive, as a busines…

> OSS is simply not a sustainable business model

OSS is not a business model, but more closely matches charity and non-profits, and run on donations and altruism of their users.

i find it annoying that people here keep saying that a company _should_ pay for their open source software usage just because they have money to do so. They don't have an obligation. They could donate - and some do - but it is in no way required of them, regardless of how much value they derive from using said OSS.

Open-core projects, which has a somewhat useless core and a paid for 'enterprise' version is not, under my eyes, a proper OSS project, but instead is a way to market their proprietary product.

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#183

Post by pjmlp »

nicoburns wrote: post #169
pjmlp wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All fine and dandy, except that those patches and collaboration don't pay bills.

Often big companies employ people directly to work on open source projects that they use heavily. That does pay the bills.

Big companies like Dropbox....

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#184

Post by amw-zero »

ram_rar wrote: post #68

I feel so old now. There was a time, when I used to discuss with senior engineers @ Yahoo! to use NginX over Apache. Nginx was the hot thing, popularizing C10k [1]. Now in my current team, I have junior devs in my team pushing for Envoy over HAProxy/Nginx setup. Is this trend happening primarily because devs are pushing for GRPC over REST? What benefits does Envoy offer over Nginx, if you're still a REST based servic…

This is just the software industry. Maybe it’s because we’re so young. Maybe it’s because software is relatively easy to change and experiment with.

Who knows. All I know is, it’s exhausting, and ultimately it’s terrible for the end user. We have no idea what we’re doing when we pull in a new dependency like this. There’s tiny corner cases we don’t think about, and those get passed on to the user.

Innovating is fun, but exhausting in aggregate.

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#185

Post by randompwd »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #107
e40 wrote: post #40

Also note that we’ll cover the open source version of the Nginx, not its commercial version with additional features. It always kills me when very successful companies don't buy software from other companies. I remember being at a lunch with a prospective client that really loved our technology. About 1/2 way through, he said he really would love to purchase our software, but the CEO doesn't allow them to use anythin…

I’m increasingly concerned about being screwed by non-OSS vendors. Imagine a use case like Slack. Say you have an employee that goes to visit a family member in Venezuela & connects to the company Slack. Slack has been given a mandate to terminate accounts for people in Venezuela by the Trump administration, and now your key employee is cut off from communication, or perhaps your Slack account gets flagged.

That not a non-OSS issue. That's a SAAS issue.

Even if your SAAS was OSS, they could still deny you access as you're inhibiting their server, not your own.

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#186

Post by mperham »

mholt wrote: post #121
atonse wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they mentioned that they wanted to use C++ instead of go to get even that extra performance out. I use Caddy a lot and it's perfectly fine for my scale, but at dropbox's scale, maybe go wouldn't be enough for the ingress part?

I just lament the increasing deployments of programs written in memory-unsafe languages to the edge, in general. I am more curious what makes the author think Caddy "might not be the best choice for a general purpose ingress/egress proxy" (there were no other qualifications to that statement, but no evidence to support it either).

Yeah, to its credit, the article brought it up but then kinda hand waved away "envoy had many more security issues than nginx". Having a huge load of C library dependencies in a user-facing service seems like a bug these days.

Part of reducing dependencies in my own software was a conscious decision to minimize future CVE exposure.

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#187

Post by Bombthecat »

gitgud wrote: post #86
SaveTheRbtz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The subject of monetizing opensource software is a tricky one. Some companies pursue the Open-Core principle, others monetize through the consulting services or cloud infrastructures. As for investing into opensource, Dropbox is trying to do that when possible, for example we (along with Automattic) did sponsor HTTP/2 development in Nginx.

Personally I think that monetisation of open-source goes against the consumer of the OSS in practically all cases. - Open-Core::: Features are not added to core, as they want people to upgrade. - Consulting::: Ease of use is ignored, as if it's too easy people won't need consultants. - Sponsoring Goals::: Software is almost held at ransom, until goals are reached. The best way to help open-source software is to donat…

Since when does blender 3d offer consulting?

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#188

Post by PopeDotNinja »

randompwd wrote: post #185
PopeDotNinja wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m increasingly concerned about being screwed by non-OSS vendors. Imagine a use case like Slack. Say you have an employee that goes to visit a family member in Venezuela & connects to the company Slack. Slack has been given a mandate to terminate accounts for people in Venezuela by the Trump administration, and now your key employee is cut off from communication, or perhaps your Slack account gets flagged.

That not a non-OSS issue. That's a SAAS issue. Even if your SAAS was OSS, they could still deny you access as you're inhibiting their server, not your own.

Fair point.

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#189

Post by Shorel »

pjmlp wrote: post #114
ram_rar wrote: post #68

I feel so old now. There was a time, when I used to discuss with senior engineers @ Yahoo! to use NginX over Apache. Nginx was the hot thing, popularizing C10k [1]. Now in my current team, I have junior devs in my team pushing for Envoy over HAProxy/Nginx setup. Is this trend happening primarily because devs are pushing for GRPC over REST? What benefits does Envoy offer over Nginx, if you're still a REST based servic…

Yep, gRPC is the new toy for distributed computing, after everyone realised that DCOM, CORBA, RMI, Remoting actually made sense instead of parsing XML and JSON text formats all the time.

I read that part as:

Protocol Buffers are good enough to make us forget the traumas caused by CORBA.

Re: Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy

#190

Post by Shorel »

dmicher wrote: post #36
ci5er wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is C++ generally considered to be "better"? I've always looked at it (esp. with STL) as kind of a "Swiss-Army-Chainsaw" and you were going to shoot your eye out. Maybe that view is old and things are better - but I learned a while back that sending a young gun into a C++ application's code-base would lead to a world of pain) Maybe that learning is no longer accurate? What do you think?

When we are comparing C, Lua (Nginx) and C++ (Envoy). Yes C++ is better :).

It depends on the team. C++ can be better. It can also be worse.
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