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 bartread on Sunday February 25, 2018 @04:35AM (#16458080)

How does that work out? In situations, granted only a small handful, I've worked where AWS has been extensively used what ends up happening is everyone ends up doing "devops". Whatever that might mean in a formal sense, the way I see it playing out in reality is that every engineer ends up having to spend time tinkering with the infrastructure, so does it really free up valuable engineering time?

For personaly projects, I use AWS and Azure (though am likely to migrate everything to a single box at OVH because it turns out to be cheaper for better performance - go figure) and it's made a certain amount of sense (up to now). At work we use dedicated hardware, because the cloud can't deliver the bang per buck.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Dropbox saved almost $75M over two years by moving out of... by noway421 on Sunday February 25, 2018 @04:48AM (#16458108)

You still need to engineer devops yes, so having an engineer allocated to that still makes sense. If "everyone ends up doing "devops"" you might not have a general infrastructure strategy (what your engineers need is a CI/CD pipeline) or doing something like microservices (which might or might not make sense depending how flexible you want to be and how many teams you have/need to have).

At growth companies using cloud makes complete sense because it's all about time to market and iterating on your business proposition. Requirements change all the time and having flexibility of cloud offerings gives you the velocity. Whether at scale/in maintenance mode it makes much for sense to cut corners and optimise spending.

Either way you want to focus on what brings the most business value.

[ Parent | on HN ]