Re:Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud
by discodave on Monday March 14, 2016 @07:09PM
(#11286260)
One of the AWS people at Re:Invent mentioned that Amazon is storing 8EB across all storage services (S3, Glacier etc.)
So 500PB is ~6% of that... Although I'm sure Amazon would have liked to keep Dropbox as a customer it's probably a pretty small percentage of their revenue. Also, if you assume that AWS is growing at ~50% year over year then 6% of S3 is only about one or two months worth of growth.
I think it was this talk but I'm not sure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HDQsW_r1DM
With storage you're constantly mothballing and replacing old iron behind the scenes, so Amazon might just ditch a bunch of old depreciated drives without hard feelings. AWS being on the up and up for SMEs, they are probably not crying over losing one large but very demanding customer -- and DB are still on AWS for European customers anyway.
You must have left a large hole in AWS' revenue stream. I assume their fees for transferring your data out of their system helped cover that short-term, but 500PB of data is a lot of storage capacity to sell.
Your other answers indicate your separation with AWS was very amicable, much more amicable than I would have expected. Either "its just business" or they have plans to backfill the hole you left.