“It’s kind of a backwards approach,” he admitted. Garetson’s team operates in granular, near-term planning windows - often six months, sometimes three – much shorter than common-practice.
But the company’s approach to capacity planning today might be a surprise. That Dropbox went through this exercise shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone who reads a site like DCK on a regular basis. As customary, the team built a model for data center capacity planning. We looked at what our capacity is, what we anticipated our growth to be,” Latane Garetson, Dropbox’ head of data center physical infrastructure, told Data Center Knowledge. Now the Magic Pocket journey is starting to look more like a pioneer expedition. There could be valid reasons for, to put it romantically, a journey home. Its move out of the cloud was not widely perceived as a journey from which the rest of the IT world could learn any pertinent lessons.įive years later, many more organizations, including those outside of the IT industry, are discovering that limits to their infinite scalability in the public cloud do exist. Unlike the everyday enterprise in an industry like petroleum, healthcare, or insurance, Dropbox had an interest in directly engineering service advantages into its own system. Statements like that provoked some to see Dropbox’s reverse migration as a kind of one-off event. Related: How Dropbox Re-architected Its Cloud to Use Higher-Density Storage Few companies in the world have the same requirements for scale of storage as we do.” “It was clear to us from the beginning that we’d have to build everything from scratch,” wrote Dropbox infrastructure VP Akhil Gupta on his company blog in 2016, “since there’s nothing in the open source community that’s proven to work reliably at our scale. Between February and October of 2015, Dropbox successfully relocated 90 percent of an estimated 600 petabytes of its customer data to its in-house network of data centers dubbed Magic Pocket.
It foresaw a time when it could no longer scale its services in sync with customer demand, despite Jassy’s promises that Amazon’s resources were effectively infinite. Related: Here’s How Much Money Dropbox Saved by Moving Out of the CloudĮarlier that year, Dropbox - a cloud data storage service founded on AWS - launched its effort to move the other direction. “And then you get to deploy your application on worldwide infrastructure.” Move to the cloud and “you get to take that scarce resource - your software development engineers - and instead of having them work on the undifferentiated heavy lifting of infrastructure, you get to work on what differentiates your business,” remarked AWS CEO Andy Jassy during his company’s 2015 re:Invent keynotes. “Undifferentiated heavy lifting.” This is how Amazon Web Services has characterized the work normally conducted by IT departments in enterprise data centers since the launch of its public cloud service.
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