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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)

#191

Post by Daishiman »

rualca wrote: post #187
Daishiman wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post proves parent's point though. You're not doing anything even remotely close to the features offered by cloud providers or even managed hosting providers. Disaster recovery? Geographically separate redundant servers with failovers? Automated (and proven to work) backups? One-stop access control for infra maintenance? Audit controls for your database and storage objects? Tape backups? Even today to support al…

> You're not doing anything even remotely close to the features offered by cloud providers or even managed hosting providers. So what? Who in their right mind believes in, say, you need to operate and maintain half a dozen types of RDBMS in three flavors along with two or four or eight different message brokers and your own convoluted infrastructure-as-code multiplied by three along with a repackaged FLOSS offering..…

You are assuming that that vast majority of shops have the capacity to impose a very limited number of technologies, and secure them through common best practices.

This is about as far from the truth as I have experienced in life.

Fortune 500 companies have an innumerable number of platforms for software, use hundreds of products from dozens of vendors, many dead long ago. Same thing with governments, at every level of scale. Telecoms? Utility providers? Medium-sized businesses who are not in tech? Specialist software that runs in a basement rack and that eventually gets moved to a datacenter and compliance requirements begin demanding all the bells and whistles I just mentioned.

Without a doubt there's a lot of gross compute power that lives on the VMs you just mentioned. But all their financial processing is probably about a fraction of what some AS/400 or mainframe doing a nightly batch job, with software running from decades ago and licensing costs going into 7 figures a year.

What you're asking for just doesn't exist. You can do what you're mentioning across, maybe, a single product line and a half-dozen teams. But even that company needs to use CRMs, ERPs, and custom stuff for which you cannot possibly define platform requirements on your own, limited, terms.

A customer that I used to admin their Unix servers on had software on IBM mainframes, IBM AS/400s, Solaris, AIX, two SCO Unix machines running some proprietary hardware control plane, a few thousand Windows machines, etc. You want a "real" ERP product? It's gonna run on Oracle or DB2, forget about Postgres. That app you made 15 years ago running on MySQL with the ISAM storage engine? Forget about ever upgrading that. Need to interact with banks? Holy smokes have I got bad news for you. You need software to interact with medical records that requires special legal compliance across multiple jurisdictions? Well, no one cares what that runs on as long as it keeps the millions rolling in.

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

#192

Post by Ericson2314 »

makapuf wrote: post #99
Ericson2314 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's insane that running a for-higher data center is considered a high-margin business. (And testament that the customers are VC-gorged price-unconcious baby gremlims.) In a sane economy, data centers for higher would be a fully-commoditized barely-profitable common carrier with little natural monopoly.

Not nitpicking but I had trouble understanding one thing: for higher should be spelled for hire I guess

Sorry! Wish I could edit but it's too late.

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

#193

Post by Ericson2314 »

Daishiman wrote: post #170
fakedang wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently I just began using cloud services. I started with Firebase, thought it was super cool, then moved to GCP, which was super inflexible (and super shit support). So I decided to try Azure, since we used that at a previous startup, but it was too complicated to even get started. So I decided to give Jeff my money (or rather avail of his free tier), and started using AWS. While it's super complicated to use compa…

> The only solution to break out of such a duopoly would be for tech oriented companies to stop being lazy and start building out their own cloud infra. What competitive advantage do you get by making your own in-house, inferior version of an infrastructure service that won't benefit from AWSs economies of scale?

Not getting bled dry by Jeff?

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

#194

Post by Ericson2314 »

jasode wrote: post #115
Ericson2314 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's insane that running a for-higher data center is considered a high-margin business. (And testament that the customers are VC-gorged price-unconcious baby gremlims.) In a sane economy, data centers for higher would be a fully-commoditized barely-profitable common carrier with little natural monopoly.

>But it's insane that running a for-higher[sic] data center is considered a high-margin business. (And testament that the customers are VC-gorged price-unconcious baby gremlims.) Your analysis is incomplete which is why it looks like insane high-profit margins. Amazon AWS (and MS Azure, Google Cloud) also sell high-value services on top of raw datacenters. It's not just commodity rack servers. Amazon keeps iterating…

I'm pretty sure the main "value" those services "add" is resume padding.... :/

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

#195

Post by tester756 »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #124
esoterica wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

I think they could hire very skilled people from poorer countries for like 60K USD / yr

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

#196

Post by dilyevsky »

ehsankia wrote: post #178
dilyevsky wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except when driver decides to take couple days off and you can’t get anywhere or their cars breaks down for a day and they say it’s still within slo because the radio still worked (looking at you GCP)

Except in this analogy, a taxi breaking can be quickly replaced with another taxi, the issue is when the whole taxi network goes down which is more rare. If you had your own car, if the machine went down, it would be a lot more work to fix it yourself.

True but i can buy more cars/parts and still save money. Also it’s only rare if you judge by status page

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

#197

Post by fakedang »

Daishiman wrote: post #170
fakedang wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently I just began using cloud services. I started with Firebase, thought it was super cool, then moved to GCP, which was super inflexible (and super shit support). So I decided to try Azure, since we used that at a previous startup, but it was too complicated to even get started. So I decided to give Jeff my money (or rather avail of his free tier), and started using AWS. While it's super complicated to use compa…

> The only solution to break out of such a duopoly would be for tech oriented companies to stop being lazy and start building out their own cloud infra. What competitive advantage do you get by making your own in-house, inferior version of an infrastructure service that won't benefit from AWSs economies of scale?

Not being overly dependent on an outside provider? AFAIK, most traditional corporates using clouds often use multiple cloud services of the same type from different providers.

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

#198

Post by peterwwillis »

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…

Why do people buy coffee from Starbucks?

Is it because Starbucks has the most efficient cost outlay for long term investment in a user's needs?

Or is it because people just want some damn coffee and there's one on every corner?

Or is it because, in a world full of places to buy coffee, one place gives you everything you could ever dream of in a coffee place?

That is what the big cloud providers are. They are Starbucks. They are not the cheapest. They aren't even the best. But they are everything you want.

If your company gets Starbucks-huge, you don't need to buy your coffee from Starbucks. You have your own deals with roasters and your own supply chains and baristas and coffee logistics experts.

That's why some companies build their own. Not because it's a better idea (it's not), or because Starbucks costs too much (compared to the investment in re-creating Starbucks?). It's because they are a business that effectively makes their own coffee already, so it makes no sense to pay Starbucks for it. Of course, they won't have a Starbucks once they make their own coffee, but they will have served their needs well enough.

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

#200

Post by RemingtonLak »

randomdude402 wrote: post #190
RemingtonLak wrote: post #181

Well unfortunately I'm seeing this in my microscopic way. I moved off all of my domains and hosting from GoDaddy (shrugging in disgust) to Google domain+GCE. yikes, with virtually no traffic outside of me ssh'ing, my 2 vm instances is costing me $45/mon just basically sitting idle. I gotta be doing something wrong!

You can spin up a VPS on digital ocean for $5/month

Thanks will look into that. Don't understand why at smallest GCE instance why the cost is so high for virtually no traffic.
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