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 imbkr on Sunday February 25, 2018 @01:31PM (#16460352)

was the comparison based on on-demand instances or reserved instances? we reserve almost all of our instances within our company for 3 years and also get an extra discount on top of it. based on my calculations, i've seen AWS cheapest out of all. would like to know if i'm missing anything

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Re:Dropbox saved almost $75M over two years by moving out of... by IgorPartola on Sunday February 25, 2018 @03:11PM (#16460911)

This was a few years ago so prices have changed on both sides. What I advocate is doing exactly what you did: do a comparison with actual numbers and performance stats instead of hand waving that the cloud is always best.

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Re:Dropbox saved almost $75M over two years by moving out of... by mgkimsal on Sunday February 25, 2018 @04:14PM (#16461186)

another factor that gets overlooked some is on-hand skills and hireable skills.

if you have experience (and/or your team does) with dedicated, that should probably be for a non-trivial in decision making. likewise if you have more aws/cloud experience (or have those skills available on staff), there's benefits to that.

cloud skills don't magically happen - someone with minimal AWS skills can provide you with a setup that is more expensive to run, and possibly more insecure than a locked down dedicated box.

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Re:Dropbox saved almost $75M over two years by moving out of... by IgorPartola on Sunday February 25, 2018 @06:04PM (#16461745)

Exactly. If you have expertise to run your own servers, and you don't have a spiky workload, maybe it's worth it. If you have cloud expertise, that may be the winner.

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