Dropbox saved almost $75M over two years by moving out of AWS

Re:Dropbox saved almost $75M over two years by moving out of... by kristianc on Sunday February 25, 2018 @03:19AM (#16457819)

They absolutely are a technology company, but compute (EC2) and storage (S3/Glacier) is a utility, like power supply. This wasn't the case back when you needed capacity planning, but today with dynamic provisioning and cheap storage, it is.

No one tries to build their own power station, or make their own laptops. They're better off using engineering resources on higher order stuff, unless, like Dropbox, the margins / TCO you are getting on your storage is an absolutely huge deal.

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Re:Dropbox saved almost $75M over two years by moving out of... by pbhjpbhj on Sunday February 25, 2018 @11:18AM (#16459583)

Even domestic premises have solar with grid top-up (and they can sell back to the grid often too). Like having baseline server resources on your own hardware and AWS - or whatever - for handling high demand.

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Re:Dropbox saved almost $75M over two years by moving out of... by Symbiote on Sunday February 25, 2018 @03:25AM (#16457840)

But people do build their own power stations or hardware if they're big enough.

They might outsource most of the work, but then the gap between generating and using power is much more clearly defined.

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