Name: Why Dropbox Uses its Own IT Infrastructure
Uploaded: 2016-07-11
Duration: 3 min 50 s
Description: It previously relied on Amazon Web Services.

[ MUSIC ] From a tech perspective the big story about Dropbox over the last year, although you guys have been working on it longer. Was the move off Amazon web services. Build your own network. Was this mostly driven by tech, from your perspective, technical needs and maybe even not being having kind of a master up in Seattle? Or was it an economic decision for you guys? I think a lot of it was, well this was a big bet we placed, because we were one of the largest cloud services in the world. Amazon's been a great partner for us, and we're still a customer. In Europe [ UNKNOWN ]. And you still use them in Europe, right? Yeah, so we still use Amazon for a bunch of things, but We went from zero a couple of years ago to standing up one of the largest cloud infrastructures in the world. And then we had this pretty wild migration challenge where we had to get several hundred petabytes of data from Amazon on to our servers. Inside Dropbox we talk about it's like changing the engines on a jet Inflight without any of the passengers noticing. And so, cost part of it. But really it's flexibility. Being able to have full control over the stack. Being able build a more integrated experience. As you think about how the experience would evolve. And there's a lot of exciting things on the horizon. In compute and machine learning and so on. We have Total control over our staff. Given the amount you did invest in it, at what point do you start making your money back on this? Well I think the proof is in the numbers. Last month we announced that we are free casual positive which is a really exciting milestone for us and again another way that we- But you might have gotten there faster if you hadn't spent. How much? It has to be a lot. Yeah, it's a big investment, many hundreds of millions of dollar investment. We're planning for the really long term and we thought this is a really foundational thing for us and we are also a little unusual, most companies are not this kind of scale where we are. Again, Amazon has been a great partner but we found that we could Both have more. Because of the scale we are then there is a cost advantage and there's a flexibility we have by moving a lot of it in- house. So you do still use AWS in Europe. When do you plan to move off that or do you plan to move off it? So we're just going to AWS in Europe to satisfy mostly the needs of larger business customers who wish to keep their Data domiciled in Europe and we expect that that'll work quite well so we don't have any plans to change that. You know, we've always had like, a hybrid infrastructure and we have flexibility to dial it up or down in one direction or the other. Is there a point, and I understand the way you guys have done this is said you want to have full control of the stack and this helps you on a technology flexibility for Dropbox Is there any plan at any point that you guys, not that you'll become a direct rival to say NAWS or Google Cloud, but that you guys will start offering your network to other companies to build on? [ CROSSTALK ] Well, certainly we want to. We have hundreds of thousands of developers on our platform. We enable all kinds of different apps to plug into Dropbox and that will continue. Continue to invest in the platform. But some of the benefit of being able to operate or own the whole stack ourselves is we have a lot of projects that serve pretty ambitious. So we announced one called project infinite, where you can have an infinite- sized dropbox, never run out of space. This is critical, especially in a larger company, where you have many You know terabytes of information but if you got a MacBook with 128 gig SSD something's got to give and we'll be the first to make that really work. So we shouldn't expect it in two years in five years that you're gonna see companies basically using Dropbox's network like they currently use Amazons? We're not going after the commodity part of the public cloud so we're not gonna sell. We're certainly not in the business of storage or team space. Right. [ MUSIC ]

It previously relied on Amazon Web Services.