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Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

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Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#161

Post by voltagex_ »

jamwt wrote: post #151
samstave wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you using spindle or ssd or flash? (admittedly I dont know if you consider flash and ssd to be the same) What is your price per GB raw?

> Are you using spindle or ssd or flash? (admittedly I dont know if you consider flash and ssd to be the same) We have flash caches (NVMe) in the machines, but the long-term storage devices are spindle--PMR and SMR. > What is your price per GB raw? I cannot disclose, exactly, but it is well below any other public price I've seen.

So NVMe is "ready for production"? Do you think you'd use it at home, or only in the enterprise?

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#162

Post by willglynn »

pnathan wrote: post #143
james_cowling wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use a variant on Reed-Solomon coding that's optimized for lower reconstruction cost. This is similar to Local Reconstruction Codes but a design/implementation of our own. The data placement isn't RAID. We encode aggregated extents of data in "volumes" that are placed on a random set of storage nodes (with sufficient physical diversity and various other constraints). Each storage node might hold a few thousand volu…

That is extremely cool. Please tell the author(s) of that system that a stranger on the internet has appreciation for that feat!

You might be interested in a paper Microsoft published a few years ago, entitled "Erasure Coding in Windows Azure Storage", which describes some similar concepts in greater detail:

http://msr-waypoint.com/en-us/um/people/yekhanin/Papers/Usen...

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#163

Post by jamwt »

voltagex_ wrote: post #161
jamwt wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you using spindle or ssd or flash? (admittedly I dont know if you consider flash and ssd to be the same) We have flash caches (NVMe) in the machines, but the long-term storage devices are spindle--PMR and SMR. > What is your price per GB raw? I cannot disclose, exactly, but it is well below any other public price I've seen.

So NVMe is "ready for production"? Do you think you'd use it at home, or only in the enterprise?

I mean, if at home you need 400k IOPS, 1GB/s of writes, and 2.2GB/s of reads... go for it! I sure don't, but more power to you. :-)

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#164

Post by jamwt »

josh2600 wrote: post #160
virtuallynathan wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i.e. 1Tbps? Jeez! That is crazy.

If you are moving bits from $External_DC to AWS, your best bet is to colo inside Equinix (or equivalent) and use their cross-connect to AWS service. If you have 100 fiber interconnects between you and AWS, you can move a lot of data (it becomes an interesting programming problem to figure out how to saturate that much fiber consistently). In terms of your customers getting data to you, again, fiber interconnects insi…

Yes, balancing links and distributing work w/out congestion collapse became a really interesting and nontrivial problem.

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#165

Post by matt_wulfeck »

The open-source alternatives to S3 have a long way to go, especially since AWS S3 is so simple and reliable. I ran Openstack swift in production once upon a time and I remember the entire system coming down because the the rsyslog hostname did not resolve. Ouch. I'll let somebody else work out those bugs.

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#166

Post by tomatoman »

james_cowling wrote: post #91
jamwt wrote: post #86

I want to point out one other thing about this project, if only to assuage my guilt. And this community of hackers and entrepreneurs seems as good a place as any to clear the air. There is a necessary abridgement that happens in media like this, wherein a few individuals in lead roles act as a vignette for the entire effort. In particular, on the software team, James and I are highlighted here, and it would be easy t…

Couldn't agree with this more. One of the things that's not immediately apparent in an initiative like this is the huge amount of effort required to provision, deploy and manage a system of this scale, across a whole bunch of different teams. We couldn't have done any of this without a tremendous group of SREs with the wisdom to invest heavily in automation, in addition to all the hard work. We'll follow up in a week…

Is it true a girl broke your arm while arm wrestling?

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#167

Post by james_cowling »

tomatoman wrote: post #166
james_cowling wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't agree with this more. One of the things that's not immediately apparent in an initiative like this is the huge amount of effort required to provision, deploy and manage a system of this scale, across a whole bunch of different teams. We couldn't have done any of this without a tremendous group of SREs with the wisdom to invest heavily in automation, in addition to all the hard work. We'll follow up in a week…

Is it true a girl broke your arm while arm wrestling?

Haha, who am I to argue with a story like that?

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#168

Post by josh2600 »

jamwt wrote: post #164
josh2600 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are moving bits from $External_DC to AWS, your best bet is to colo inside Equinix (or equivalent) and use their cross-connect to AWS service. If you have 100 fiber interconnects between you and AWS, you can move a lot of data (it becomes an interesting programming problem to figure out how to saturate that much fiber consistently). In terms of your customers getting data to you, again, fiber interconnects insi…

Yes, balancing links and distributing work w/out congestion collapse became a really interesting and nontrivial problem.

I can't even imagine.

Did you guys get into custom network hardware or still a Juniper/Cisco shop?

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#169

Post by sciurus »

debaserab2 wrote: post #129
jclaybaugh wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

devops is not a job title. It is a way of doing things.

Except it is actually a job title at all sorts of places.

And if you google it, you'll see plenty of discussion around why that's controversial.

https://www.google.com/search?q=devops+job+title&ie=utf-8&oe...

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