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Dropbox Moves Users' Data Off Amazon S3 to Its Own Infrastructure
Reader Richard_at_work writes: Dropbox today announced that it has been working on a "top secret" project called Magic Pocket for the past two and a half years to get data of more than 500 million users from Amazon S3 to its own custom-built infrastructure. The company says that it has migrated over 90% of its users' data so far. Dropbox's relationship with AWS isn't completely over, however, as they will continue to use AWS for specific regional data stores where there is a requirement.
I'd say there is no surprise to see them vertically integrate; they're large enough to leverage the economies of scale of running their own storage for themselves; rather than to pay someone else to do it.
Does this mean that I'll finally be able to download my files as a .zip archive? I have some directories in Dropbox with a lot of files in them, and I get some bullshit message about the folder being too large to download, or something like that, when I try to use the functionality that exports the directory a .zip archive. It's not even that much data. Maybe like 5 GB in total. But I always get that fucking message, and it never lets me download these directories as an archive. I even bought the pro subscription, and it still won't let me easily download an archive of my directories! I don't want to install the goddamn desktop client just to copy a few directories of files from Dropbox! Isn't that the whole goddamn point of the cloud? I can just use my goddamn web browser to interact with it, instead of a custom native app?! Holy fuck, all I want to do is download an archive of a directory in Dropbox. Why the fuck do they make it impossible to do that easily?! Does this move to their own infrastructure finally make it possible for them to let me download my directories as .zip archives?!
Why use some one else cloud when you could make your own?
So they basically re-did everything that backblaze did for it's storage pods.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Unless they get new software that supports the ZIP64 extension probably not.
Because your own cloud server requires maintenance, and when your cloud server goes down you're SOL until you, personally, have the time to troubleshoot and fix it.
How do I know this? My server developed a tic in it's network card, corrupting about 1 bit in every 5,000,000,000 or so. Took me a year to find that I actually had a problem with the server, and then two weeks to narrow down what the problem actually was. As a side effect I also found that I had a dodgy drive cable (one of 6 in the system) which showed no outward sign of problems because CRCs were correcting those bit problems.
Could this happen to a cloud service? Sure. Are they likely to catch it? Faster than I am, in all likelihood. Will it take them less time to correct it? You're damn sure it will. And for the cost of the time I spent troubleshooting my server, I could have paid for a decade of service from two cloud services so that I had 100% redundancy, and still had money to go buy a kegerator so I could drink beer instead of chasing bit problems.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
It's hard to say why Dropbox started this plan to migrate away from Amazon S3. But more control is probably a good guess.
Calm down. Just because Dropbox is big enough to "build their own cloud" doesn't mean it's right for everyone. There are always exceptions to the rule. Google, Facebook, Dropbox etc. are different. Your startup still needs the public cloud, be it AWS, Azure, or Google. When you get big enough, do what you want.
More storage with their free tier! Seriously, guys, 2GB doesn't cut it anymore. Your competitors like Google Drive and Microsoft Onedrive are offering five times more storage for their free tier customers.
Why use some one else cloud when you could make your own?
Have you ever tried to roll your own industrial strength, production quality cloud infrastructure? That shit gets expensive, and it requires you to do significant investment up front. At this point we are dealing with issues of capital flow, acquisition (or rental) of equipment, depreciation of said equipment, etc.
Renting cloud services, on the other hand, it changes the equation. What used to be a capital expense, it becomes an operational expense. It might sound more expensive down the line, but it stills reduces the strain in your capital flow. This is particularly true when your business is not the business of building a cloud, but to do something else that can be done with or without the cloud.
This is very similar to other industries where they lease equipment rather than buying because a) even though total cost of ownership might be cheaper down the road, b) the up-front price of purchase is prohibitively high.
The important thing is business is not so much to reduce expense in absolute terms, but to manage expenses in a predictable, periodic manner over time. For many companies (not all, though), going into the cloud as opposed to rolling their own cloud solution, it helps them achieve that kind of balance.
...their free tier customers.
For me, as free tier customer is not a customer, it is a prospect.
That's because the competition is shit and Dropbox doesn't need to play the storage giveaway game anymore.