71–80 of 218 posts
So they saved next to nothing? Their yearly operating expenses are in the order of $1.3B, which doesn't even include cost of revenue. $75M savings versus $2600M operating expenses over those 2 years comes out to about 2.8% savings.
Just as a reminder: You are not Dropbox. You personally need to run the numbers with both scenarios. Depending on your use case, it may be cheaper to be in AWS, and it may be cheaper to be co-located. If you are as big as Dropbox, it may be cheaper to build your own data center. It reminds me of the arguments for and against K8s. Most of the discussion is based on use case, and not considering the solution space for…
>You are not Dropbox That may actually work the opposite way. The big guys can negotiate pricing with the cloud providers to the point where they may be running at close to cost. It's the small and mid tiers that get hosed with cloud pricing. >You personally need to run the numbers with both scenarios. Depending on your use case, it may be cheaper to be in AWS I'm not sure about that. Certainly cloud infrastructure p…
A public cloud inherently/structurally has more costs because it is built to be truly multi-tenant and has lots of elastic capacity.
A single tenant private cloud can cut out a lot of bells and whistles and can be tailored to the needs of the company's private use-case – this brings down the cost significantly.
If your compute/storage bill is greater than $10 million per year, then it is highly likely that for the same money you will get much higher compute/storage capacity in a private cloud. And that gives you more headroom for growth/elasticity etc.
If your bill is greater than $30 million per year, then you will likely save significantly as well as get other strategic advantages – especially if your infra scale continues to grow over next 2-5 years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>You are not Dropbox That may actually work the opposite way. The big guys can negotiate pricing with the cloud providers to the point where they may be running at close to cost. It's the small and mid tiers that get hosed with cloud pricing. >You personally need to run the numbers with both scenarios. Depending on your use case, it may be cheaper to be in AWS I'm not sure about that. Certainly cloud infrastructure p…
[deleted]
Just as a reminder: You are not Dropbox. You personally need to run the numbers with both scenarios. Depending on your use case, it may be cheaper to be in AWS, and it may be cheaper to be co-located. If you are as big as Dropbox, it may be cheaper to build your own data center. It reminds me of the arguments for and against K8s. Most of the discussion is based on use case, and not considering the solution space for…
Stories like this can be really misleading because large companies almost can't help but trick themselves into financial shenanigans. It's very possible that Dropbox just spent $100M upfront to start saving $35M / year relative to AWS current prices... but discovers in year 3 that they are no longer saving money because AWS has reduced prices via their own R&D, which is spread over a massively larger customer base.
Now, because Dropbox is a storage company, it may well make since for them to continue R&D and try to keep pace with AWS, at least for their own needs. But 99% of other companies - of any size - would likely fall on the wrong side of the scenario above.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Netflix is a counterpoint? A good fraction (though not majority probably) of their cost is probably bandwidth and computation yet they continue to offload that to a cloud provider, who's a direct competitor no less.
it would be insane for them to deliver their video content over aws.
At some point it might be interesting to calculate the size of your company in terms of how many racks you have and how many employees you have. These days a fully loaded rack costs a lot more than your typical Software Developer salary.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Netflix is a counterpoint? A good fraction (though not majority probably) of their cost is probably bandwidth and computation yet they continue to offload that to a cloud provider, who's a direct competitor no less.
By some measures, that's much more extreme than running your own datacenter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Netflix is a counterpoint? A good fraction (though not majority probably) of their cost is probably bandwidth and computation yet they continue to offload that to a cloud provider, who's a direct competitor no less.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Netflix is a counterpoint? A good fraction (though not majority probably) of their cost is probably bandwidth and computation yet they continue to offload that to a cloud provider, who's a direct competitor no less.
I 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…
You’ve described the historical value of cloud computing perfectly. That said, I think the days where all but the largest or most stubborn companies run their own datacenters are coming to a close. The problem will be finding skilled labor. Short-haul networking, power configurations, thermal load, hardware maintenance; these and many more are specific skills that can’t be learned overnight. Data center work used to…