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Why Dropbox decided to build its own infrastructure and network

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Re: Why Dropbox decided to build its own infrastructure and network

#111

Post by peanutgallery27 »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #84
mulmen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this line of thinking a lot but I don't really buy it. You could just as easily say it's amazing that Amazon allows a competitor like Netflix to run on it's platform. The reality is that relationship is more complex than that.

Netflix is going to exist regardless of whether Amazon lets them run on AWS. Amazon letting them run on AWS is brilliant as they get a piece of Netflix's pie. So even if Netflix beats Amazon Prime, Amazon gets to dip into their pot via revenues from AWS. It's a great hedging of bets.

They're totally separate businesses. The people that treat Netflix like their customer aren't the same people making strategic decisions about Amazon Prime. Amazon is a ridiculously large company.

Re: Why Dropbox decided to build its own infrastructure and network

#112

Post by erikbye »

scurvy wrote: post #90
yeukhon wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, but some is probably an understatment. They are pretty much run everyting on AWS except what you cited (e.g video processing and content delivery). Netflix is the biggest AWS user.

Everything on AWS except their largest, most critical piece of infrastructure that needs to be the highest performing. That says it all right there.

https://www.networkworld.com/article/3037428/cloud-computing...

And,

> We rely on the cloud for all of our scalable computing and storage needs — our business logic, distributed databases and big data processing/analytics, recommendations, transcoding, and hundreds of other functions that make up the Netflix application. Video is delivered through Netflix Open Connect, our content delivery network that is distributed globally to efficiently deliver our bits to members’ devices.

Source: https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/completing-the-net...

Netflix still operates its own data centers and CDN to deliver video. This is not done on AWS.

Re: Why Dropbox decided to build its own infrastructure and network

#113

Post by zuzun »

justonepost wrote: post #36

Is 500 petabytes really that epic? 1500 tapes? I could probably stuff that in the back of my minivan.

"I have a few qualms with building storage data centers. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by putting 1500 tapes into the back of your minivan and then mounting them locally via curlminivantapefs."

Re: Why Dropbox decided to build its own infrastructure and network

#114

Post by scirocco »

gordon_freeman wrote: post #10
epa wrote: post #4

This means their EBITDA now probably shows profitability (servers they own are amortizable [the A in EBITDA], where are AWS is expensed.) Edit: Amortization/Depreciation can generally be used interchangeably.

Good point. I always wonder how such accounting changes truly reflect the financial performance of the company. On one hand it's a lot of upfront cost to Dropbox with high risk too but all that won't show up completely if this cost is amortizable over the long run.

With HPE Flexible Capacity they only pay for the HW they consume. Cloud-model on premise. https://www.hpe.com/emea_europe/en/services/flexible-capacit...

Re: Why Dropbox decided to build its own infrastructure and network

#115

Post by iUsedToCode »

Dropbox is cool and all, but i hate their pricing model. I just want to keep about 50-100 GB there (i don't hoard stuff). I don't wanna pay $10 / month for that. At backblaze i pay less than $0.5 / month. I could pay quadruple, since Dropbox is a lot better service (and quite a different one, too). But not 20 times as much.

I know that Dropbox doesn't care about my tiny dollars and all. But why not let customers pay for what they use? This "constant growth" bullshit is probably the reason they don't care.

Re: Why Dropbox decided to build its own infrastructure and network

#116

Post by mseebach »

bsenftner wrote: post #103
antoncohen wrote: post #32

Dropbox hasn't dropped AWS, they moved things off AWS as it made sense to. The article is talking about two things, the move of file storage and a network backbone. Neither of which were done recently. The file storage move from S3 to Magic Pocket is detailed in these blog posts: https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/03/magic-pocket-infrastr... https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/05/inside-the-magic-pock... https://blo…

The 'value' cloud services provide is purely for experimental services an organization does not want to commit physical assets. Those deluded to believing cloud services provide any value beyond test service deployments are propaganda poster boys for today's tech sucker awards.

Surely, there are people out there who overpay for AWS resources. But the truly deluded are those who purport to understand the sheer width and breadth of organisations and their wildly different requirements and priorities well enough to to brand them suckers.

Re: Why Dropbox decided to build its own infrastructure and network

#117

Post by qaq »

mc32 wrote: post #79

What does AWS do when someone moves 500PB of storage off of their systems? Do they sit idle till some other big customer comes along or is their growth so phenomenal that a 500PB move off doesn't even slow new (storage) deployments at all and just keep up their pace?

Directly moving out 500PB of data of AWS would cost 20+ million dollars depending on usage patterns might be cheaper to gradually shift usage.

Re: Why Dropbox decided to build its own infrastructure and network

#118

Post by corford »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #57
corford wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much anyone... Hetzner, Linode, Choopa

For those I need to run a VPS, which also costs money and has fewer PoP and more mangment overhead. EDIT: I guess I was talking about CloudFront specifically, not EC2. EC2 is pretty pricey.

Sorry misunderstood. You could try here https://www.cdnperf.com/ and compare egress prices/limits.

Re: Why Dropbox decided to build its own infrastructure and network

#119

Post by fragmede »

dingo_bat wrote: post #104
amorphid wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the largest cloud provider that does NOT offer a Netflix-like streaming video service? Amazon/AWS, Microsoft/Azure, and Google Cloud all have offer premium streaming content of some type. IBM Cloud?

Microsoft has a Netflix-like service?

I presume amorphid is referring to the tech stack supported in Azure and not a consumer facing service.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/media-services/

(MSNBC would be a video streaming service that bears Microsoft's initials, but they sold off their stake in 2012)

Re: Why Dropbox decided to build its own infrastructure and network

#120

Post by lstyls »

xbmcuser wrote: post #100
xbmcuser wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah and that's why it amazes me that Netflix uses Amazon a straight competitor that uses the money it makes from Netflix to compete with Amazon prime.

My point was that Netflix uses AWS services exclusively instead of dividing it between multiple services at least though now days they probably get really deep discounts from Amazon to stay on AWS because of competition and it probably is lot cheaper for them then building and maintaining it's their own servers.

Netflix built their own CDN ages ago. Given that their core business logic is basically static content delivery whats left to AWS probably is a lot less than commenters in this thread seem to think.
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