{"id":21167,"date":"2016-03-15T14:54:59","date_gmt":"2016-03-15T14:54:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.businesscloudnews.com\/?p=246932"},"modified":"2016-03-15T14:54:59","modified_gmt":"2016-03-15T14:54:59","slug":"dropbox-drops-amazon-web-services-for-in-house-system","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/dropbox-drops-amazon-web-services-for-in-house-system\/","title":{"rendered":"Dropbox drops Amazon Web Services for in-house system"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Hand<\/a>Dropbox has announced that it will no longer be utilizing Amazon Web Service\u2019s cloud infrastructure, favouring its own in-house solution.<\/p>\n

The project, named \u201cMagic Pocket\u201d has been in the works for over two and a half years, and will store and serve over 90% of users\u2019 data on the company\u2019s own custom-built infrastructure. Dropbox was one of Amazon\u2019s first customers to utilize its S3 service to store bulk data eight years ago, but has commented that the relationship will continue in certain areas.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs the needs of our users and customers kept growing, we decided to invest seriously in building our own in-house storage system,\u201d said Akhil Gupta, Dropbox VP of Engineering. While the company has traditionally stored file content on Amazon, the hosting of metadata and Dropbox web servers has always been in data centres managed by Dropbox itself.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were a couple reasons behind this decision. First, one of our key product differentiators is performance. Bringing storage in-house allows us to customize the entire stack end-to-end and improve performance for our particular use case,\u201d said Gupta. \u201cSecond, as one of the world\u2019s leading providers of cloud services, our use case for block storage is unique. We can leverage our scale and particular use case to customize both the hardware and software, resulting in better unit economics.\u201d<\/p>\n

The company has witnessed healthy growth over recent years, recently passing<\/a> the milestone of 500 million users and 500 petabytes of user data, prompting the in-house move. Back in 2012, the company only had around 40 petabytes of user data, demonstrating 12-fold growth in the last four years. Dropbox initially began building its own storage infrastructure in 2013, with the company first storing user files in house in February 2015. The team hit its goal of storing 90% of its data in-house on 7 October 2015.<\/p>\n

\u201cMagic Pocket became a major initiative in the summer of 2013. We\u2019d built a small prototype as a proof of concept prior to this to get a sense of our workloads and file distributions. Software was a big part of the project, and we iterated on how to build this in production while validating rigorously at every stage,\u201d said Gupta \u201cWe knew we\u2019d be building one of only a handful of exabyte-scale storage systems in the world. It was clear to us from the beginning that we\u2019d have to build everything from scratch, since there\u2019s nothing in the open source community that\u2019s proven to work reliably at our scale.\u201d<\/p>\n

The move highlights the transition through to private cloud as a business benefit once enterprise reaches a certain level. Zynga is another company who have a similar story, moving between private and public cloud in recent years. Zynga is now in the process of shifting its data back onto in-house infrastructure. Dropbox\u2019s move highlights the potential for overhead reductions when effectively moving onto private cloud, though if the company fails to scale as planned, the move could become a financial burden.<\/p>\n

While the move does result in AWS losing a substantial amount of business, it is not the end of the relationship. The team will continue to partner with Amazon for new projects, but will also offer its European customers the opportunity to store data on AWS infrastructure in Germany, should they request it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dropbox has announced that it will no longer be utilizing Amazon Web Service’s cloud infrastructure, favouring its own in-house solution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":203,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,186,1976,54,524],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aws","category-dropbox","category-news-analysis","category-private-cloud","category-public-cloud"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/203"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21167"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21167\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21183,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21167\/revisions\/21183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icloud.pe\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}