Hybrid Cloud File Server
Dropbox states We do not need Amazon web services! Well, not really, but you have the idea. I bet most of you have used Dropbox. In 2007, Drew Houston, the current founder and CEO of Dropbox, was fed up with misplacing his USB key. So he hacked together the first, easy-to-use personal cloud storage. Today, even though Dropbox offers less free storage than other personal cloud drives, with half a billion users, Dropbox is still very popular. This part you probably already knew. What you probably did not know was that your Dropbox files were not in a Dropbox data center. Instead, they were hiding on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). As Akhil Gupta, vice president of infrastructure engineering at Dropbox, explains: \We were the first users of Amazon S3, which allowed us to expand our operations quickly and reliably.
Amazon Web Services is and remains an invaluable partner - we could not have grown as fast as we did without a service like AWS. \As the needs of our users and customers grew, we decided to invest heavily in building our own internal storage system. There were some reasons behind this decision. First, one of our key differentiators is performance. Internal storage allows us to customize the entire stack from end to end and improve performance for our particular use case. Second, as one of the world's leading providers of cloud services, our use case for block storage is unique. We can leverage our scale and our particular use case to customize both hardware and software and provide better unit economics. \Technically, Dropbox has always had a hybrid cloud architecture.
It hosted its metadata and web servers on its own data centers, while storing the contents of the files on Amazon S3. Now, to improve customer performance, Dropbox brings storage internally to its own private cloud: Magic Pocket. Magic Pocket is designed to become an exabyte scale storage system. Dropbox started it as proof of concept in 2012. After testing it, the company rolled it out as a \dark launch\ in 2014. Then, on February 27, 2015, Dropbox began storing and serving exclusively user files. Over the next six months, Dropbox has accelerated the system to more than 500 PetaBytes. As of October 30, 2015, earlier than expected, Dropbox hosted 90 percent of US data from its internal servers. This does not mean that Dropbox has dropped S3. This is not the case. With 75% of its users outside the US and many more in Europe, Dropbox will begin hosting European customer data by the third quarter of 2016. Dropbox will do so in an AWS data center in Germany.
The real story is not how Dropbox uses technology. The question is whether using a hybrid cloud will enable the company to reach a point where its incremental costs will decrease relative to a public cloud provider. In summary, can a hybrid cloud approach be profitable for a company offering \public\ cloud services? The answer to this question is going to be one that Dropbox and many other companies will be interested in knowing. Good post. I do not appreciate this website. Keep up the good work! ... cloud for extra computing power if needed. A real example of a hybrid cloud is the template used by Dropbox. Initially, Dropbox relied heavily on AWS until they moved most of their data to their own private ... Fill in your details below or click on an icon to login: You're commenting using your account WordPress.com. (Logout / Change) Yor comment using your Twitter account. (Connect - Out
