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A comment on Dropbox saved almost $75M over two years by moving out of AWS. Parent comment

Re:Dropbox saved almost $75M over two years by moving out of... by candiodari on Sunday February 25, 2018 @05:02AM (#16458155)
> Yes, a lot of companies use cloud services when they don't need them. However, Google Cloud's compute pricing is reasonably similar to DigitalOcean (with sustained usage discounts) and from what I hear these companies will often negotiate discounts. AWS can seem a bit pricy compared to alternatives, but I'm guessing that Amazon offers just enough discounts to large customers that they look at the cost of running their own stuff and the cost of migration and Amazon doesn't look so bad.

Of course, the dollar amounts dropbox saved are compared to those negotiated prices.

In my experience it isn't so much the storage price itself, but the network transfer that makes AWS absurdly expensive.

Most companies don't need something like S3. They can perfectly suffice with one server, maybe using RAID-1, or just using backups. Data corruption mostly happens through logical errors anyway and nothing in S3 will protect you from that.

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Re:Dropbox saved almost $75M over two years by moving out of... by jon-wood on Sunday February 25, 2018 @08:38AM (#16458875)
> Data corruption mostly happens through logical errors anyway and nothing in S3 will protect you from that.

S3 supports object versioning, which very much will protect you from anything other than writing the wrong data for the entire history of an object.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Dropbox saved almost $75M over two years by moving out of... by candiodari on Sunday February 25, 2018 @09:31AM (#16459102)
Versioning is optional and just becomes part of the file data. Write garbage into that and it'll still take a lot to fix it.

Anyway, there's plenty of filesystems that have versioning built in as well.

Besides, I've been tasked with recovering the specific state of a database where every version of every object was available, and it was only some 200k or so records. That took me about 2 weeks. (mostly for writing code that could find a consistent version of the whole thing)

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