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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.
Maybe but OpEx is tax deductible. CapEx is not.
Um, what is this crap? When did they actually move? How long did it take? The title of this HN link leads you to believe this is recent, but the article makes it seem like a multi-year effort, that in fact, could have finished a long time ago.
This article sounds like a PR puff piece. If you downvote me, please explain why this blog article actually means anything to you.
:)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. The title is misleading and should be changed.
But the blog itself lacks a lot of information. The timeline is really, really significant here. Did they initiate this back in 2013? 2015? My company has seen a remarkable shift in trust for online services change the last two years. Was Dropbox ahead of this curve? Were they someone who brought this change in mentality around? This blog article is crap because without a basic sense of _when_ it could be that they w…
TechCrunch is only useful for headlines today, go elsewhere for actual content.
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.
I don't think this article is news. The editorialized title in HN is unfortunate and I wish a mod can change it. The article talks about the reasons Dropbox decided to move 500PB storage into our own data centers. Also like the article mentions, "They still use AWS for some workloads".
Edit: Here is another HN submission of the same piece with the correct headline. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15257331
Also, as mentioned elsewhere in the comments here, it should be retitled to "Why Dropbox decided to drop AWS"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This article sounds like a PR puff piece. If you downvote me, please explain why this blog article actually means anything to you.
I am the CEO of a 3 person startup, and this piece has made me realize how critical it is to own your infrastructure if you truly want to disrupt and dominate the industry. I am making our engineers build our own data center at once, and am now hiring for Lead Data Center Engineers (15+ years AWS experience required). :)
Dropbox has moved user data from S3 to its own colocated data centers over the past few years, and is also doing compute in those data centers too. The compute actually existed for quite a long time - in the past you'd be talking to a Dropbox run server which would connect back to S3 to retrieve data.
Dropbox is definitely still an AWS customer, just not a major S3 or EC2 customer anymore. For example, all transactional email uses SES, and DNS is hosted on Route 53.
Here's an article from last year with a lot more detail - https://www.wired.com/2016/03/epic-story-dropboxs-exodus-ama...
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.
Realistically, the valuation multiples on EBITDA for mature SaaS businesses are different from those for datacenter operators, and someone building a financial model for Dropbox would now likely take a blend of these this into consideration. So EBITDA is by no means the end-all be-all here.
EDIT: And taxation is a different story altogether, as in either the cloud or own-hardware case, Dropbox can write off expenses or depreciation respectively.
Can we remove /amp/ from the end of the URL? Some people still use HN on a laptop or a desktop. Also, as mentioned elsewhere in the comments here, it should be retitled to "Why Dropbox decided to drop AWS"