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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)

#121

Post by ericbarrett »

birdyrooster wrote: post #85
ericbarrett wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They aren’t shrinking at all, we have the same talent pool and are trying to thinly spread it over all of the problems we can solve with networked computers. The amount of problems you can solve with networked computers has scaled way faster than our industries capability to find talent and train employees.

Who is “we”? Always curious what remains of my field—I’ve worked in the storage and infrastructure industry for over 20 years. If you mean the industry as a whole, I simply disagree. The talent pipeline is not there anymore. You used to be able to get started without an Engineering degree by “getting in at the bottom.” Now somebody on this path will never get past power supply swaps because they’re just doing drudge work fed to them on a tablet (“replace disk 17 on row 23, rack 9, slot 4”—“oh, yup, there’s the yellow light”). If you do have the degree, there are a billion more profitable paths, and most take them.

Re: Dropbox saved $75M over two years by building its own infrastructure (2018)

#122

Post by rualca »

waprin wrote: post #107
ericbarrett wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not just managing the complexities of managing the bare metal, although that's certainly a huge component of it. There's some other huge arguments against running your own datacenters. One is being able to properly provision resources. Being able to write just a function and have it consume just that tiny amount of resources rather than a whole VM is huge. Being able to spin instances up and down as you need the…

> One is being able to properly provision resources. Being able to write just a function and have it consume just that tiny amount of resources rather than a whole VM is huge. Being able to spin instances up and down as you need them is huge.

A 75 million dollar price tag is also huge.

Bothering about the operational impact of a VM or a request sent to a function-as-a-service might be a significant operational issue if your whole team can be moved around with a small sports utility vehicle.

Once you've grow over the point where your monthly cloud pricetag eclipses your company's paycheck budget, operating your own hardware is a no-brainer.

> But cloud platforms in 2020 have a lot more features (...)

That really doesn't matter at all, does it?

I mean, cloud providers are already repackaging FLOSS services as their Serverless offering.

And besides pursuing the latest fad, how many of those features are killed off and vanish from the face of the earth?

It's always great if we can get others to do the work for us, but if we consider the absurd premium charged by cloud providers for their services... Well, those "others" doing the work can be employed by your company and you still save money.

Re: Dropbox saved $75M over two years by building its own infrastructure (2018)

#123

Post by smarx007 »

evrydayhustling wrote: post #105
dswalter wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why must Amazon pass off its savings to your org, in this example, rather than taking most of those realized R&D savings to their own investors? Sure, AWS may be constantly innovating on doing things more cheaply and scalably. Sometimes, those savings get passed off to the customer; but not most of it, and not necessarily all that frequently.

Check out these curves: https://www.stayclassyinternet.com/articles/investigating-AW... Amazon competes with other cloud providers and with build-your-own continually, and use price segmentation to stay on the right side of the equation for as many people as possible, while still skimming as much premium for themselves from each user group. Historically, that’s meant big price drops in most categories that would make…

Yes but no. The figure you reference shows the lowest price of a lowers tier available. I am pretty sure if you cannot switch from S3 with full availability to S3 Glacier, your savings will not be SO impressive as that fall-off-the-cliff figure.

Re: Dropbox saved $75M over two years by building its own infrastructure (2018)

#124

Post by simonebrunozzi »

esoterica wrote: post #116
mikekoscinski wrote: post #101

Some assumptions to analyze this switch: - Dropbox saves $50M/year in AWS costs - Dropbox spends $200K/year (salary, benefits, equipment, SaaS, etc.) for their average infrastructure engineer Following those assumptions, Dropbox must hire Of course, these assumptions may be wrong (please correct them if so!) and this entirely ignores the unique computing needs of Dropbox's business, which may be unique vs. anything a…

I'm guessing the $200k is a considerable underestimate.

Agreed; probably more in the ballpark of $275k / $300k.

Re: Dropbox saved $75M over two years by building its own infrastructure (2018)

#125

Post by vp8989 »

thor24 wrote: post #118
spullara wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are now businesses that explicitly depend on the elasticity of the cloud and can never really be moved on premise without massive up-front investment in hardware that may only be used a few times a year for their biggest customers. Trying to hybridize these workloads hasn't been very successful as of yet. It is possible that K8S could relive this problem but I haven't seen it in practice, at scale.

Instant Elasticity in Cloud is a myth. If you think you are going to get 1k hosts just like that from AWS you will have an unpleasant experience. I work at one of the decent size tech company and we are split between cloud and on prem. From our experience you have to inform AWS/GCP in advance (sometime way early) if you are looking to meaningfully increase capacity in zone/region. Sure, auto scaling few hundreds of h…

"Instant elasticity in cloud is a myth"

This times a million. I think SQS standard queues are probably the only thing that IME actually fulfill that promise.

Re: Dropbox saved $75M over two years by building its own infrastructure (2018)

#126

Post by simonebrunozzi »

streamich wrote: post #11

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.

Do you know more about this? Curious if they ever entertained buying Wasabi, of if it's just an idea of yours.

I think it's a good idea. But when deciding whether to acquire a company or not, there are several factors involved, only one of which is the technical fit.

Re: Dropbox saved $75M over two years by building its own infrastructure (2018)

#127

Post by cbg0 »

walrus01 wrote: post #88

A good compromise halfway is to have your own equipment in colocation, at a facility where your IP transit upstreams are Depending on your scale might even be able to peer with them directly if you're big enough. Or, if you are big enough to justify it you can order direct 10Gbps cross connects within a number of facilities to AWS.

> So, essentially, in the same building or across the street? May be very tricky to pull off.

Re: Dropbox saved $75M over two years by building its own infrastructure (2018)

#128

Post by ProAm »

oblio wrote: post #114
ProAm wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the main advantage of cloud providers is to offset the risk of purchasing equipment that eventually is no longer needed, Every corporate use case I have seen is labor based. They dont want the overhead of salary and healthcare for the IT department. Even if long term they end up paying more, they always view it has pay for it now or pay for it later. And they always choose later because they dont know bette…

> And they always choose later because they dont know better. This is a dangerous assumption to make. Delaying payments and going with the crowd are both safe decisions. Safe decisions are smart decisions under normal circumstances.

True there is not one answer for everyone. I just know Ive been a part of companies where we go IAAS, get rid of the people that have the knowledge to manage infrastructure and when it comes time to need the knowledge again we either need to get consultants or hire at a much more expensive rate as for infrastructure management talent pool is getting smaller everyday. To be fair I deal with the headaches more than the everything is fine and dandy so my views are skewed as a result.

Re: Dropbox saved $75M over two years by building its own infrastructure (2018)

#130

Post by dangus »

calderarrow wrote: post #3

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…

I wonder if Dropbox is an outlier.

Their product is extremely close to basically just reselling storage space. Of course it makes sense for them to build their own infrastructure.

For a company whose product is a saas application (business logic in code) with users spending hundreds or thousands of dollars per month, those cost savings may never materialize relative to the amount of infrastructure each customer is using per dollar.

Dropbox is essentially buying a barrel of gasoline and selling it in gallons. Their product can never be profusely more valuable than the underlying infrastructure.

As I recall there are giants like Netflix that still run on AWS...which brings up another point! If you’re large enough to consider your own data center, you’re large enough to negotiate contracts with cloud providers at below-retail rates.

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