But as we got bigger, storage seemed to be an area where we might have some advantage,” Cowling explains.Īlthough most companies will find that public cloud services suffice for most of their needs, Dropbox may not be alone in seeking an in-house infrastructure edge, according to Robert Mahowald, IDC group vice president for applications and cloud: “We are beginning to see a time when for many businesses, infrastructure all of a sudden has tremendous value, if you need very high performance, high I/O, seek/access speed for disk, or optimized hardware.” “It’s not easy to do something better than Amazon. One of these services turned out to be Project Infinite, which relies on the Dropbox infrastructure to serve up an unlimited amount of data to desktop users.ĭropbox executives weighed the options and decided that moving data storage in-house was the best choice, despite daunting challenges that included improving on the S3 storage architecture, moving vast quantities of data in a short amount of time, and running large numbers of data storage devices economically and reliably. More important, making the move would give Dropbox greater control over the data and the ability to offer improved storage services to its customers-a potentially critical competitive edge. Taking over storage could potentially lower costs. Meanwhile, Amazon was poised to offer services similar to those of Dropbox in Amazon WorkDocs. Over-dependence on Amazon risked leaving Dropbox with an unfeasibly high cost structure. Despite smooth sailing, company leaders saw ominous signs on the horizon. “We could do the things we did best and outsource the rest.”īut over time, that assessment changed. “It seemed we had a competitive advantage running the metadata ourselves, but not the storage, since there was a huge volume of data,” says James Cowling, principal engineer for Dropbox. That hybrid architecture worked well for a time. Why leave the cloud for on-prem?ĭropbox, a popular provider of cloud-based document storage and collaboration services, developed a fast-growing business by relying on Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) to house data, while keeping metadata on premises. When it comes to hybrid cloud strategy, Dropbox has learned that striking the right balance is key.
But it’s not an either-or proposition: The company is going back to Amazon to provide major new cloud services in Europe.
It was a moonshot-caliber undertaking that’s paying dividends for Dropbox in faster performance and lower costs.
A little over a year ago, Dropbox completed one of the largest reverse cloud migrations ever undertaken, moving some 600 petabytes of data from Amazon’s cloud to its own data centers.
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