Why Dropbox decided to build its own infrastructure and network (opens in new tab)

From the last link, in 2016 "Proxy-Stack deployed at our edge PoPs to terminate SSL connections closer to our users".

Reminds me of the infamous "SSL added and removed here! :^)".

Does anyone know if there are any additional protections from snooping on their internal network?

edit: phrasing

The epic story of dropbox exodus from the amazon cloud empire

https://www.wired.com/2016/03/epic-story-dropboxs-exodus-ama...

They moved most of their stuff away from AWS.

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.

Actually, since the servers themselves are physical assets with a useful life, and indeed could be leased independently from the business model during that useful life, they'd be modeled as depreciation not amortization. But yes, EBITDA would be increased either way.

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.

Good point. I always wonder how such accounting changes truly reflect the financial performance of the company. On one hand it's a lot of upfront cost to Dropbox with high risk too but all that won't show up completely if this cost is amortizable over the long run.

This could have been the decision driver. It is also why investors increasingly look past ebitda to free cash flow which is harder to game.

Maybe but OpEx is tax deductible. CapEx is not.

(Dropbox employee)

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

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.

This article isn't an announcement - it's a "Why we did it". They started transitioning years ago.

and Netflix?

Please, how fucking stupid. Of course they moved as much as possible off AWS, and only use AWS for new and experimental services. The markup of cloud servers is immoral, and the brainwashing that cloud services are a value at all is a testimony to how many people simply do not do the math.

with no actual facts, i'll speculate.

let's assume they have 12 buildings at each region with 500 racks in each. 6k racks

Let's assume that S3 is 1/4 of their infrastructure.

Let's assume you can put 60 * 12TB disks in 4U and they use 52 racks. That's 136012TB per cabinet or 9.4PB per rack.

1500 racks at 9.4PB raw capacity with RF=2.1 so best case that's that's 1500 * 9.4 / 2.1 = 6700PB at a site.

So 500PB would be 7% of the space.

They're probably growing 5-15% per month like most hot companies now, so that's 1-2 month's growth.

Of course these numbers are certainly off. But probably in the magnitudinal ballpark.

There are hard quota enforced on storage. You will have to fill a truckload of forms to get your quota raised to 500PB.

I personally never asked for that much but I'd speculate that they won't give you that in any single region.

Directly moving out 500PB of data of AWS would cost 20+ million dollars depending on usage patterns might be cheaper to gradually shift usage.

Make the sane choice of applying to work for Dropbox =:)

To fit 500 petabytes on 1500 tapes, you'd need to put 333TB on a tape. Do any currently available tape formats support that much data on a single tape?

Granted, I stopped paying attention to tape drive capacities a while ago, but the upcoming LTO-8 standard will "only" support 13TB/tape, so you'd need 38,000 of them to hold 500 PB.

I've seen some higher density announcements in the 200 - 300TB/tape range, but couldn't find any products available.

AWS does offer a "Snowmobile" [1] product, that can hold 100PB on disks in a tractor trailer.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-snowmobile-move-exabyte...

"I have a few qualms with building storage data centers. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by putting 1500 tapes into the back of your minivan and then mounting them locally via curlminivantapefs."

Great comment for 2017. I would like to see the 1987 version and the 2037 version of it.

What will you tell your customers, exactly, while you go on a road trip with their data? And what happened to the data between the time you load Tape 0001 and Tape 1500?

Moving 500PB on a live application is not a trivial task.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. –Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981

what bugged me about their pricing model (perhaps it's changed?) is that things people share with me count to my cap. I had a client share stuff with me via dropbox. So I signed up. I get "2 gig free!" Yay. Another client shares stuff with me. Then another. Then another. Then I'm at my 2gig cap with just other peoples' stuff. They all think it's great, because none of them are paying for it. I needed to pay money to support their free use of the service, and I declined. Just one more $x/month service I didn't need to get hooked to. Maybe the pricing model has changed what they count now?

Performance and reliability definitely affect subscription rates. Revenue growth is actually more important than decreasing costs (as long as your costs don't start increasing disproportionately).

I can see how you would think it is only about cost.

However, then you've had Amazon tell you "no" when you try to get more resources, and when you've had your business go offline for hours while you wait for news from Amazon, you may want more control.

The article is unfortunately not very specific and I can not find much information with a quick search, but:

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!

Yes, marketing. Also software development, web development, design, customer services, corporate services, support, sales, PR/comms, human resources, finance & accounting, legal, and so on.

1500 sounds like a lot, but keep in mind how many customers they have, and in how many countries they sell their services.

The wording got mixed up a bit. "Infrastructure" was a much larger organization, but there was an infrastructure team of about 12 people who worked on Magic Pocket at the time.

https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/05/inside-the-magic-pock...

I was also thinking that those numbers are really weird, for a company which does infrastructure(fileservers)-in-the-cloud. Obviously some devs doing software for various platforms, business-side folks and so forth. But 1500:12 is a really weird ratio, given the core function of the business. If they're not spending on infra staff... what staff are they spending on?

I am reading it from a desktop and I had to do a double take when I instantly noticed how it was techcruch but didn't have the epically annoying fixed sidebars and delayed loading ads messing with my scroll bar. I came here to suggest we add /amp to the end of all techcrunch submissions. Title, content and a single static ad at the end, if all news sites were like this I would not complain.

I'm against Google hosted amp but what's the issue with self hosted? This page is so much nicer than the overly busy normal TC site.

Why is there always so much hate for amp on HN? I'm on a PC and I vastly prefer these pages to the huge/bloated default pages offered by so many publishers. Using the TC page linked in the original post as an example, if I turn on Ghostery it blocks 22 trackers! https://imgur.com/a/iTnlT

On the Amp page, it only catches one: https://imgur.com/a/P7mww

What exactly is /amp/?

Oh wow, I did not even notice this until you pointed it out.

So the solution is SO bad that the "amp" tag even becomes part of the URL?!

Now THAT is really weird ... well aside from me disliking AMP anyway, that ... hmmm. We can send people to the moon, probably soon elswhere but ... we have to denote that ... we use AMP by ... a appended string called 'amp'.

Google should be ashamed of this "engineering".

They were off of it quite a while ago from what I remember. Perhaps they are completely off of it, as in, "we deleted our account" off of it.

I agree. The title is misleading and should be changed.

This article sounds like a PR puff piece. If you downvote me, please explain why this blog article actually means anything to you.