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Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

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Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#181

Post by johnloeber »

tschellenbach wrote: post #176

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.

Because having your entire business model depend on the pricing whims of another business (which in the grand scheme of things is a competitor, btw) is unsustainable. Getting out of AWS is exactly the right move for Dropbox's long term health.

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#183

Post by tschellenbach »

johnloeber wrote: post #181
tschellenbach wrote: post #176

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.

Because having your entire business model depend on the pricing whims of another business (which in the grand scheme of things is a competitor, btw) is unsustainable. Getting out of AWS is exactly the right move for Dropbox's long term health.

There are many cloud hosting providers and they are competing intensely.

AWS marginal cost increase for supporting Dropbox is far below the cost of Dropbox building and maintaining their own solution.

Given these facts they should be able to negotiate a far better price/cost than their current solution of building it in-house.

There is nothing unique about their requirements which justify this move. It's a really weird decision. Probably we're missing something here. This must be part of some larger strategy they are executing.

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#184

Post by [deleted] »

johnloeber wrote: post #181
tschellenbach wrote: post #176

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.

Because having your entire business model depend on the pricing whims of another business (which in the grand scheme of things is a competitor, btw) is unsustainable. Getting out of AWS is exactly the right move for Dropbox's long term health.

[deleted]

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#185

Post by gbrayut »

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?

We have been primarily using Intel NVMe storage for our database servers since fall of 2014 with no major complaints. Our high end desktop/laptop systems are also using the latest Samsung NVMe M.2 drives which are screaming fast.

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#186

Post by ec109685 »

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…

How do you know you are never influenced by the ads you see?

Also, Google Contributor network let's you block any DoubleClick ad, while still paying the publisher for the page view, so that might get what you want.

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#187

Post by ec109685 »

apalmer wrote: post #23
planetjones wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how do you think it's possible that you can easily get a $15/month dedicated server? Sorry makes no sense to me.

I don't understand your concern. Fundamentally, if you have large enough consistent need for storage/VMs/Any non proprietary resource then AWS is not the lowest cost option by a long shot. This is not at all a controversial statement. Even taking into account depreciation, administration, maintenance etc, if you have a large enough consistent need amazon is not the lowest cost option by a significant margin. This isn…

That doesn't have to be true. Amazon or one of their competitors could provide a discount by locking into multi year discounts (e.g. reserved pricing).

The cloud providers are in a cut throat business (mitigated somewhat by value added services), so the price will bob along near cost (though they may eak out more profit on some work loads compared to others).

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#188

Post by ec109685 »

true_religion wrote: post #75
iofj wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep in mind that that doesn't just result in more costs : it results in limits on scaling. Suppose you are on S3 and you can serve a customer x Mb/$. Now you're limited to products that you can charge more for. Suppose you get data served to customers on dedicated at x/10 Mb/$ (easily doable, and compared to S3 I bet x/50 would be doable). Isn't this how products like facebook video, vimeo (and thousands of porn sit…

I'd agree with that. Let me provide some numbers. Currently, S3 will provide bandwidth out for 300TB/month at ~$21,000. At our web host the same bandwidth would cost $1800. At our CDN, the same bandwidth would cost $3585 to $4791 depending on the number of points of presence you'd require (6 vs 17). S3 and its extreme availability profile is nice, but its not cost effective when the difference between pricing vs the…

If you are using a CDN, then the outgoing bandwidth isn't as large a concern for some work loads.

It is sad that bandwidth charges out are so expensive because it does make one question their services.

Re: Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud

#190

Post by scurvy »

jamwt wrote: post #152
dexterdog wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was the problem I always had in my pre-cloud days. We were usually running racks half-full because of power restrictions in the DC. It was convenient because you could keep you cold spares and tools in your expensive space, but it always seemed like you should be putting more useful stuff in the racks.

You can substantially change the economics if you design your own power distribution systems.

Aye, but even off the shelf 3ph 50A 208v circuits gets you a lot of power. That's enough for 7 or 8 4U storage nodes with 70 drives each.

Then again, I don't really like putting too much weight that high up in a rack that already has 2600lbs of gear in it.

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