I would have loved to see them buying Wasabi instead of building their own infrastructure, and becoming the biggest client of Wasabi at the same time.
Dropbox saved $75M over two years by building its own infrastructure (2018)
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Re: Dropbox saved $75M over two years by building its own infrastructure (2018)
#12I think this quote really hits the nail on the head and confirms what a lot of people may have intuitively known about the value of cloud providers: But once certain startups turn into big companies with hundreds of millions of users, with computing needs that they’ve come to intimately understand, it can be far more efficient to set up computing infrastructure designed exactly with those needs in mind. I think the m…
Dropbox is in a relatively specific situation wherein their cloud costs would be extremely high (storage, bandwidth) and their in-house technical skills are probably quite good.
Re: Dropbox saved $75M over two years by building its own infrastructure (2018)
#13I think this quote really hits the nail on the head and confirms what a lot of people may have intuitively known about the value of cloud providers: But once certain startups turn into big companies with hundreds of millions of users, with computing needs that they’ve come to intimately understand, it can be far more efficient to set up computing infrastructure designed exactly with those needs in mind. I think the m…
> My biggest question is whether cloud providers could achieve a scale where they are able to offer the most optimal infrastructure costs for specific businesses.
IMO, this has happened. AWS GovCloud. Since the USGov has near unlimited spending power, it's better for integrators to just pass the costs along. Compared to certifying your own infrastructure, this will probably be much cheaper for most everybody.
Re: Dropbox saved $75M over two years by building its own infrastructure (2018)
#14It's a classic rent vs buy conversation - if you're sure about what you want, and confident that you needs will not change drastically in the short-medium term, it makes sense to buy your own infrastructure. Else, rent someone else's.
Re: Dropbox saved $75M over two years by building its own infrastructure (2018)
#15I would have loved to see them buying Wasabi instead of building their own infrastructure, and becoming the biggest client of Wasabi at the same time.
no serious company wants to be 'the biggest client' of a company. You'll find all the scaling issues.
Re: Dropbox saved $75M over two years by building its own infrastructure (2018)
#16On the other hand it's very easy to not include certain costs in this project to make it seem like a success. Did they really negotiate with AWS, Google Cloud and evaluate the project against those rates? Did they include all the costs associated with this? How about the opportunity cost of not focusing on their product. Whenever I read posts like this I always doubt how accurate they are.
Re: Dropbox saved $75M over two years by building its own infrastructure (2018)
#17I think this quote really hits the nail on the head and confirms what a lot of people may have intuitively known about the value of cloud providers: But once certain startups turn into big companies with hundreds of millions of users, with computing needs that they’ve come to intimately understand, it can be far more efficient to set up computing infrastructure designed exactly with those needs in mind. I think the m…
Dropbox is in a relatively specific situation wherein their cloud costs would be extremely high (storage, bandwidth) and their in-house technical skills are probably quite good.
CrowdStrike is building its own servers to move off from AWS as well.
Re: Dropbox saved $75M over two years by building its own infrastructure (2018)
#18I think this quote really hits the nail on the head and confirms what a lot of people may have intuitively known about the value of cloud providers: But once certain startups turn into big companies with hundreds of millions of users, with computing needs that they’ve come to intimately understand, it can be far more efficient to set up computing infrastructure designed exactly with those needs in mind. I think the m…
Dropbox is in a relatively specific situation wherein their cloud costs would be extremely high (storage, bandwidth) and their in-house technical skills are probably quite good.
Second point is spot on. Not many companies have the engineering capabilities. Dropbox has so much potential, but their business vision wasn't great to say the least.
Re: Dropbox saved $75M over two years by building its own infrastructure (2018)
#19I think this quote really hits the nail on the head and confirms what a lot of people may have intuitively known about the value of cloud providers: But once certain startups turn into big companies with hundreds of millions of users, with computing needs that they’ve come to intimately understand, it can be far more efficient to set up computing infrastructure designed exactly with those needs in mind. I think the m…
There are not a lot of those companies which are that big.
You also might not want to manage that many it experts for your infrastructure or you are not able to get them.
Also if your companies product is very technical, i would argue that those companies are much better equiped doing it by themselfs then others.
Nonetheless, it also doesn't need to be all or nothing. You can easily combine a MultiCloud approach.
Build only the stuff which is easy to build and costs a lot on cloud yourself. I would say Buildsystems or compute instances are good candidates.
Like i could imagine putting netflix authentication system on a cloud provider while doing the compute stuff in my own data center and building the CDN myself.
Re: Dropbox saved $75M over two years by building its own infrastructure (2018)
#20Dropbox is a unique case where majority cost is storage/bandwidth by one product/team.
If you have a large organization where cost is divided in 100s of teams and products, cloud (vendor/managed) will be beneficial in removing lot of bureaucracy.