So it seemed like an appropriate name for a huge exodus of data for Amazon, says James Cowling, who led up Dropbox's Magic Pocket team under Gupta. "Putting something in the magic pocket means it's always there, no matter what you wear, or where you are," promises the video. The name "Magic Pocket" is kind of a company in-joke, taken from a promo video Dropbox released in 2009, trying to explain the then-new service in plain English. "We are never, ever losing sight of how important it is to not make a mistake," says Gupta. That would be unacceptable, given that those 500 million users are relying on Dropbox in their everyday personal and professional lives. And that kind of complacency breeds mistakes and oversights. So given the scale of what the company was dealing with, that toast was maybe an anticlimactic finale.īut for Dropbox, there was no other way it could have ended: To slow down would be to accept that they had done everything they could do. Dropbox had to think way outside the box. Dropbox wanted more control than it felt like they could get from Amazon, and their own data centers weren't enough to suit their needs. But with Dropbox usage only accelerating, they needed a system that could handle exabytes of data (that's one billion gigabyes).Īnd while Amazon Web Services is finding great success with many business customers, Dropbox's reckless drive for effiiciency is at the far end of the spectrum, putting its needs to control every aspect of its infrastructure beyond what it saw as Amazon's ability to provide.Īs Gupta asks: "How many companies have 500 million users?"Īll the while, it literally couldn't fit enough servers into the data center loading docks to handle the explosion of data it was dealing with. It wasn't any ill will towards Amazon, says Dropbox VP of Infrastructure Akhil Gupta, and in fact they're still a happy cloud customer. Over those two-plus years, Dropbox had designed and built its own storage systems - codenamed Diskotech (get it?) - and moved 500 petabytes (that's 500 million gigabytes) of stored data from the $8 billion Amazon Web Services cloud into its own data centers. When Dropbox finally finished its two-and-a-half-year-long "Magic Pocket" project in October of 2015, the team paused for a quick champagne toast.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |