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It's interesting to do a cost analysis here: It's saved "multiple petabytes" of space. Backblaze storage is $0.005/GB/Month = $5k/PB/Month. The GitHub repo h
by Jabbles 10y ago
It's interesting to do a cost analysis here:
It's saved "multiple petabytes" of space.
Backblaze storage is $0.005/GB/Month = $5k/PB/Month.
The GitHub repo has 7 authors, perhaps costing Dropbox $200k/year each and taking most of a year ~ $1M to develop this system.
So this might pay for itself after 200PB*Months, assuming Dropbox's storage costs are the same as Backblaze's prices, and assuming CPU time is free. (TODO: estimate CPU costs...)
Of course, advancing the state of the art has intrinsic advantages, but again, it's interesting to look at the purely financial point.
https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html
- placeybordeaux 10y agoI only see 3 authors.
- Jabbles 10y agohttps://github.com/dropbox/lepton/blob/master/AUTHORS https://github.com/dropbox/lepton/blob/master/AUTHORS
- vanderZwan 10y agoDoesn't mean they worked on it full-time
- BrunoJo 10y agoSpace is cheap but the bandwidth isn't. At Backblaze the download traffic costs $0.05/GB = $50k/PB.
- Jabbles 10y agoI don't think they're compressing this and decompressing it client side. At least I didn't get that impression from the article. You're correct ofc, download costs = 10 months of storage.
- aab0 10y ago> I don't think they're compressing this and decompressing it client side. The speed quotes made it sound like client-side was a concern. Why would you go to all the effort of devising a new image compression format saving 20%+ storage and on the wire, and not have it decompressed client-side, especially when you control the client?
- dgoldstein0 10y agoMy rough understand, as someone who works at Dropbox and knows some of the people who worked on this (but isn't directly involved), is that this currently only runs on our servers. The perf requirements are primarily that we don't want to slow down syncing / downloads significantly - and also want to keep the CPU cost under control. As is, the savings in storage space should easily pay for the extra compute power required.
- mseebach 10y agoWhy wouldn't they (at least, plan to)? They control the client-software.
- kardos 10y agoThe typical encoding/decoding rates are measured with a Xeon... my guess is that lower powered phones/netbooks will be considerably slower. I'd trade off a 20% longer sync time in exchange for not running my laptop battery down.
- drewcrawford 10y agoI think you may be crunching the numbers the wrong way... Dropbox is valued at $10b (regardless of what you think of that number, someone was willing to buy at that price). But they only have 1800 employees. If by some miracle 80% of them are engineers that is $7M per engineer. All this for a "pure software" business. No inventory, no manufacturing, they only recently started doing their own operations. Investors would be telling them "more engineers" => "more software" => "better Dropbox". So now you have to go out and snap up engineers in Silicon Valley, which is very very hard. But you don't offer the perk of a Google/Apple line on a resume nor the compensation of e.g. Microsoft. What do you do? Answer: you offer people the chance to work on cutting edge breakthrough technology. Not only that but it's all open source! This is a dream job for some people. They will turn down every other gig for this one. It doesn't matter that PB/mo is chump change because an investor doesn't know that, they only know the engineering headcount. If by some miracle an investor does know this is a waste of time, then you just point to this HN post and observe how many developers are interested in this technology and how it is attracting developer mindshare that can be exploited for additional hires down the road. I'm not saying it's rational–it's not. But I think there were strong incentives to greenlight a project like this, even if the actual cost savings were zero.