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Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

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Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#171

Post by echelon »

Unrelated to the content of the article--I've never seen the oft talked about "anti-adblocker interstitial" before. I was surprised to find that the website blocks viewing of the article entirely because I'm running Adblock.

It's an interesting subject. I'll never click on or be persuaded by ads, so they're not really gaining anything by showing me ads. I'm essentially worthless traffic to them no matter how they cut it.

I do understand the problem they're trying to solve, and I would like to pay for content that I find worthwhile. A convenient microtransaction protocol where I _don't have to sign in or interact in any way_ would be nice. (I don't want to waste time interacting with their bespoke account system / sign-on, even if it is "frictionless".)

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#172

Post by voltagex_ »

jamwt wrote: post #163
voltagex_ wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :-)

I'm tempted to get one and set it up as some kind of cache in my NAS. I'm already in silly territory with it now, anyway. 1GB/s of writes sounds crazy though - I haven't got anything that can write to it that fast!

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#173

Post by darkarmani »

echelon wrote: post #171

Unrelated to the content of the article--I've never seen the oft talked about "anti-adblocker interstitial" before. I was surprised to find that the website blocks viewing of the article entirely because I'm running Adblock. It's an interesting subject. I'll never click on or be persuaded by ads, so they're not really gaining anything by showing me ads. I'm essentially worthless traffic to them no matter how they cut…

I ended up refreshing, select all, copy and pasting it into my editor. That resulted in me spending no time on their page.

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#174

Post by devonkim »

samstave wrote: post #145
jclaybaugh wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"devops engineer" is most certainly a job title. Devops is analogous with "agile" when talking about process...

One thing I'll grant Agile is that there's a great deal more standardized technical topics and standards meaning expectations when using the term. With devops, there's a massive difference between how big companies (old, archaic companies by tech company standards) perceive of it compared to how smaller companies do.

My current role was sold to me as a "devops" role with the usual jargon of automation - I can't think of how this role has actually prepared me to pass a serious interview as an SRE at Google, Dropbox, Yahoo, or other tech companies. What really has happened after looking at all the recruiter spam and some of the interviews I've taken on a lark is that the term has become another way of marketing to engineers with modernized skillsets when they can't retain good ones for more than maybe two months (during which time the engineer is interviewing for another role almost certainly) because good engineers tend to run away from these companies for many legitimately founded reasons.

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#175

Post by dexterdog »

pbarnes_1 wrote: post #138
planetjones wrote: post #4

Oh dear I didn't realise Dropbox had invested all of that time and money moving into their own data centre. From my perspective the future of Dropbox looks bleak. Mass storage with Amazon is much cheaper [edit: from a consumer perspective]. I know Dropbox has superior software that works (as opposed to the poor apps by Amazon and Google) but I imagine a lot of people are like me i.e. Store most of the stuff at the ch…

No normal consumer is writing directly to S3, so the entire premise of your debate is kind of moot, that's why you're being downvoted. You're missing something here, which is that DropBox are probably now spending roughly 10-20% of what they were paying Amazon on an annual basis. The savings probably grow as DropBox grows. Those savings over your hypothetical 5 years could probably keep DropBox on life support for an…

If be surprisrd if they are saving that much with all datacenter costs counted.

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#176

Post by tschellenbach »

Why would you reinvent a piece of technology offered by various cloud providers? It doesn't make any sense, what a waste of engineering resources (fun exercise though). They should have been able to reach some middle ground with AWS about pricing.

I really doubt their in-house storage backend will be cheaper compared to the lowest rate they can get from one of the cloud providers.

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#177

Post by stock_toaster »

voltagex_ wrote: post #172
jamwt wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. :-)

I'm tempted to get one and set it up as some kind of cache in my NAS. I'm already in silly territory with it now, anyway. 1GB/s of writes sounds crazy though - I haven't got anything that can write to it that fast!

I have a PCIe NVMe card (with a Samsung 950 pro M.2 in it) in my home server, which serves as an L2arc device for a ZFS pool. It is pretty nice. Runs a bit warm though.

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#178

Post by tim333 »

planetjones wrote: post #6
jamwt wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh dear I didn't realise Dropbox had invested all of that time and money moving into their own data centre. We've had our own datacenters for a very long time; this project just represents moving "blob storage" into our own datacenter rather than just metadata. > Mass storage with Amazon is much cheaper As the article says, in Dropbox's particular case this is very untrue. Although I agree with your general point t…

Sorry I think you misunderstand me. Technically it sounds like a great achievement. Well done! Ending badly I mean that in 5 years time Dropbox will be left with a load of servers and a business model in tatters. It's the economics I think will end badly Also I am sure the in house data centre looks cheaper to Dropbox - but now they have their own hardware on the balance sheet. But I meant cheaper from a consumer poi…

>in 5 years time Dropbox will be left with a load of servers and a business model in tatters. It's the economics I think will end badly

Your main argument seems to be that Amazon, Microsoft etc will undercut Dropbox on price which is fair enough. However Dropbox has done well so far offering better service and I can see that continuing. The better service thing is mostly about the people running the services and Dropbox seem good.

To see how they are moving away from commodity storage check this out:

("Dropbox used to be fundamentally about storage but now it is changing how we view productivity and collaboration") https://www.siliconrepublic.com/enterprise/2016/03/11/dropbo...

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#179

Post by tschellenbach »

Spooky23 wrote: post #136
planetjones wrote: post #4

Oh dear I didn't realise Dropbox had invested all of that time and money moving into their own data centre. From my perspective the future of Dropbox looks bleak. Mass storage with Amazon is much cheaper [edit: from a consumer perspective]. I know Dropbox has superior software that works (as opposed to the poor apps by Amazon and Google) but I imagine a lot of people are like me i.e. Store most of the stuff at the ch…

Not at all. I work at a decent size enterprise... Buying off the shelf hardware providing an s3 style API saves us a significant amount of money, and while our scale is large, it isn't a fraction of what Dropbox is.

I think this is only true at mid sized usage. Too small to negotiate with AWS (and have an impact on their numbers) and still big enough to matter to your budget. Dropbox should have been able to get a better deal.

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#180

Post by voltagex_ »

stock_toaster wrote: post #177
voltagex_ wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm tempted to get one and set it up as some kind of cache in my NAS. I'm already in silly territory with it now, anyway. 1GB/s of writes sounds crazy though - I haven't got anything that can write to it that fast!

I have a PCIe NVMe card (with a Samsung 950 pro M.2 in it) in my home server, which serves as an L2arc device for a ZFS pool. It is pretty nice. Runs a bit warm though.

We are now well offtopic but I've seen some advice recently that advises using an SLOG rather than L2ARC for a home NAS.
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