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But generally the cloud is a very efficient place to run most workloads.
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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?