Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Dropbox decided to build its own infrastructure and network

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 158 posts

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

#121

Post by dx034 »

0xbear wrote: post #65
toomuchtodo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if they sell the storage system to someone and arrange a leaseback.

That's how Microsoft manages its campus real estate. :-)

Nearly every company does that. It's amazing how little many companies actually own. I've worked in offices where everything from building over furniture to even the plants was leased. The company ran with close to zero assets (services business). Pretty sure that this wouldn't make any sense if it wasn't for tax purposes.

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

#122

Post by paulie_a »

vacri wrote: post #59
goptimize wrote: post #51

"We’re talking about a company that had 1500 employees, with just around a dozen on the infrastructure team" - what the rest 99% of the company is doing, marketing?

I was also thinking that those numbers are really weird, for a company which does infrastructure(fileservers)-in-the-cloud. Obviously some devs doing software for various platforms, business-side folks and so forth. But 1500:12 is a really weird ratio, given the core function of the business. If they're not spending on infra staff... what staff are they spending on?

I expect that 1300 of those people are in sales.

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

#123

Post by dec0dedab0de »

ryacko wrote: post #97
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.

The really amazing thing is that Nestle licensing production of Kit Kats to Hershey.

I think that deal was done before nestle bought kitkat. Kind of like spiderman movies being with sony instead of disney

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

#124

Post by sandworm101 »

Three data centers "biult" by only the dozen people on the infrastructure team? Not possible. I wish articles like this wouldnt hype small teams where it is obvious that most all of the work was outsourced. It would seem that dropbox here was still operating as customer: ordering rather than physically biulding much of anything. Those dozen dropbox people were not running cables.

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

#125

Post by amorphid »

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?

They have premium content which can be streamed. Perhaps not Netflix-like in there business model.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/movies-and-tv

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

#126

Post by brianwawok »

qaq wrote: post #117
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.

Is this including snowmobile?

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

#127

Post by jason_pomerleau »

justonepost wrote: post #36

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

What will you tell your customers, exactly, while you go on a road trip with their data? And what happened to the data between the time you load Tape 0001 and Tape 1500?

Moving 500PB on a live application is not a trivial task.

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

#128

Post by siculars »

peanutgallery27 wrote: post #111
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are not totally separate when the P&L roll up on the same spreadsheet.

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

#129

Post by yeukhon »

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.

Isn't that what I said above?

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

#130

Post by ransom1538 »

justonepost wrote: post #36

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

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. –Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981
Post reply on HN