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Do they still use AWS for compute, with their own data center just for storage? Or do they have their own infrastructure for compute? If I remember correctly,
by z1mm32m4n 9y ago
Do they still use AWS for compute, with their own data center just for storage? Or do they have their own infrastructure for compute?
If I remember correctly, they noticed they could dust costs significantly in storage compared to S3 because the vast majority of files in your Dropbox folder just sit there and hardly need to be read or written again (photos, etc.).
If they’re not using AWS for compute, it’d be interesting to see what sort of similar reasoning they have for why the costs are cheaper in house.
- maccam94 9y agoMoving data out of AWS and using EC2 for baseline load are both more expensive than using physical servers co-located with the storage servers.
- vidarh 9y ago> If I remember correctly, they noticed they could dust costs significantly in storage compared to S3 because the vast majority of files in your Dropbox folder just sit there and hardly need to be read or written again (photos, etc.). Bandwidth costs alone for S3 are high enough that I've set up storage systems for clients that used S3 for durability but put it behind huge caching proxies that held a fairly substantial proportion of their total data, where the reduction in S3 storage paid for the cache setup several times over. Storage costs are harder to cut, but yes, S3 is typically expensive there too, but it's also riskier to do your own because of the risk of data loss. At Dropbox's scale it'll be worth it, but letting Amazon worry about durability is one of the few cases where I'll happily recommend AWS despite the high costs.