141–150 of 158 posts
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.
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.
It's very possible that they did this all on their own provided they rented cabinets/cages in an existing facility like Equinix, which is extremely common. Then they do not need to manage power/generators, fiber into the building, or any other data center necessities.
It does not take very many people to do the wiring inside a cage, especially considering Dropbox has been doing this over the span of a few years. If you've ever been physically in a data center (personally visited a few Equinix facilities myself), it's mostly one person from a company working in a cage that is wiring everything. I've rarely seen multiple people do wiring, and that same person will come back every day thereafter to continue working until the job is done.
What they are doing sounds entirely feasible. If money is no object in regards to equipment, with 3 data centers, I'd honestly say you only need 4 competent people to get the job done.
3 on-site. 1 remote/office.
From there, the more the merrier. A guy to lift the equipment up as well is nice sometimes - can be pretty heavy!
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.
For companies where the value lies in the utility of a service that can't be easily replicated, you have pricing power to make the convenience of AWS worth the expense.
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> heir blend of ridiculously overpriced bandwidth. For someone not at netflix's level, can you recommend somewhere with significantly cheaper bandwidth.
While I don't know what pricing AWS has for high bandwidth customers since it's not public, I do know that the public prices are really high. The thing is, even for smaller companies it's easy to get way better deals on bandwidth. I'm currently using a provider that runs openstack and I'm paying less than $0.009/GB, from the first byte(no commitment). I'd say that is very cheap compared to AWS pricing at $0.05/GB abo…
Would you mind sharing who that is?
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Early SSL/TLS termination is to reduce latency; the longer-lived connections from PoPs to Dropbox datacenters is over a TLS 1.2 connection with PFS. See an earlier blog post[1]: > We use TLS 1.2 and a PFS cipher suite at both our origin data centers and proxies. Additionally, we’ve enabled upstream certificate validation and certificate pinning on our proxy servers. This helps ensure that the edge proxy server knows…
Does this change the legal/geo jurisdiction of the SSL/TLS handshake?
> Between July and December 2016, Dropbox did not comply with any non-US government legal process unless issued by a US court as a result of the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty process.
... if that helps answer what you're getting at :)
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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.
You are extremely wrong. The Dropbox story shows that if the bulk of your value comes from selling a commodity (storage) then you need to improve your margins by moving away from a provider that also makes the bulk of their money selling the same commodity. For companies where the value lies in the utility of a service that can't be easily replicated, you have pricing power to make the convenience of AWS worth the ex…
I'll be 100% honest, I didn't realize Dropbox was still on AWS. You figure at a certain scale it makes more sense to run your own solution.
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.
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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.
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> heir blend of ridiculously overpriced bandwidth. For someone not at netflix's level, can you recommend somewhere with significantly cheaper bandwidth.
While I don't know what pricing AWS has for high bandwidth customers since it's not public, I do know that the public prices are really high. The thing is, even for smaller companies it's easy to get way better deals on bandwidth. I'm currently using a provider that runs openstack and I'm paying less than $0.009/GB, from the first byte(no commitment). I'd say that is very cheap compared to AWS pricing at $0.05/GB abo…
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?
I personally never asked for that much but I'd speculate that they won't give you that in any single region.