![]() ![]() The clusters held petabytes of analytical data, including server logs, instrumentation, and metadata related to Dropbox’s more than 600 million global customers. Being responsible for the durability of the data it stored in Apache Hadoop, Dropbox had to be conservative with what technologies it could experiment with. Eventually as Zynga fell out of favor in the app world, the company went back in with AWS.ĭropbox is confident that it will be around for the long haul and therefore these investments are worth it.In 2018, Dropbox identified a need to migrate away from its on-premises Hadoop clusters. It was still going to use AWS for the “peak” capacity beyond what Z-cloud could handle. Then, they decided to build their Z-Cloud, which provided the base-level of compute resources the company needed. The mobile app company built its games atop AWS, which allowed them to scale as they went viral. Zynga is perhaps the most notable example. Other companies have dropped the cloud with mixed degrees of success. More stable workloads may be able to run in-house more efficiently, although with the advent of discounted pricing for reserved instances or sustained usage like Amazon and Google offer, even steady workloads are finding relatively inexpensive homes in the cloud. IaaS cloud computing is also best for variable workloads that have variable needs for resources. ![]() There are not usually fees for uploading data into the cloud, but there are networking bandwidth costs for getting it out. Public cloud providers have what Fichera calls “tolls” on using and moving data. That doesn’t mean the cloud doesn’t have disadvantages. Cloud vendors provide you storage as a service – there is no infrastructure hardware to manage. Even if you do have the scale that would make economic sense to run it in-house, there are other advantages that the cloud brings. “Unless you’re in the upper few percentiles of size, it probably doesn’t make sense,” Fichera says of going-it-alone. But generally the cloud is a very efficient place to run most workloads. Dropbox will still be using AWS for some services, but its main storage platform will be run internally.įorrester Research Vice President Richard Fichera says unfortunately there is no simple rule for when it is more efficient to run something in your own data center compared to using the public loud. Public clouds, Gupta admits, are very good at offering infrastructure services that are good enough for many workloads. The return on investment is over a long period of time, so you need to have the scale to invest in the teams and develop relationships with vendors. “Customization is a lot of work upfront,” Gupta said. Dropbox’s journey took two and a half years and required investments in personnel to figure out how infrastructure should be customized and other workers to manage their data centers. And most companies would not see a huge benefit from customizing infrastructure to tailor it to their specific needs, Gupta says. Not every company has the scale Dropbox operates at. ![]() “By optimizing the stack and customizing the infrastructure to our use case, we were able to provide a key differentiator in the market and a key value to our users,” Gupta says. Secondly, Gupta wanted to have end-to-end control of the infrastructure so that he could control the performance, reliability and overall user experience. “The scale that we’re operating on is one that very few other companies will get to,” Gupta says. Dropbox has 500 million users and is storing 500 petabytes of data. There were two factors that made Akhil Gupta, vice president of Infrastructure for Dropbox, realize that the company should get out of the cloud. + MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Dreamhost replaces VMware SDN with open source for big savings + DropboxĪkhil Gupta, VP of Infrastructure at Dropbox ![]() Could this be a sign that as companies grow their cloud that it could be more efficient to build their own cloud? If so, what is that cut-off point where its more efficient to not use the public cloud? ![]()
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