Dropbox of 500 million users & 500 petabytes to break out of Amazon cloud

Cloud storage service "Dropbox"Is not in-house to store data, Amazon's offering"Amazon S3(Amazon Simple Storage Service) ", but at last we announced that we will build a storage infrastructure and manage 90% of all data by ourselves. This will allow Dropbox to break away from Amazon's cloud services that have been in use since the beginning of service.

Scaling to exabytes and beyond | | Dropbox Tech Blog
https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/03/magic-pocket-infrastructure/

Dropbox achieved 500 million users in 2016, about eight years after the start of service in 2008, and the stored data exceeded 500 petabytes (about 520,000 terabytes). 500 petabytes is the world's largest library "Library of Congress"It is 14,000 times the unexpected figures of all the text data over 100 million points in the collection. The data saved in 2012 was 40 petabytes, and its growth speed is remarkable.

Dropbox which grows at horrible speed Two types of data are saved by "file" and "file and user metadata". In the past, Dropbox has stored metadata on the web server of the data center that manages its own company, but the file has been saved in Amazon S3 provided by Amazon. In other words, the user did not store the data in Dropbox, but indirectly, it saved to Amazon S3.

However, with the growing needs of customers and customers, Dropbox decided to build a storage system for their company. The reason for this is to improve the performance of our own service and proprietary use of block storage to access data on a block basis. In addition, it is said that building a storage infrastructure in-house has come to a stage where cost can be reduced more than using Amazon S3.

About Dropbox's own storage system construction can be confirmed from the following movie.

Game of Clouds: Dropbox Just Declared Independence From Amazon - YouTube


According to James Cowling, who leads the storage team of Dropbox, all the books written since the days of ancient times are about 50 petabytes. The amount of data that is 10 times that data is stored in Dropbox.


Mr. Cowling has a newly built storage box that can store more than 1 petabyte of data per one.


When putting all the boxes with countless hard disks in the rack, it is said that the weight is one car.


It seems to be a positive thing that Dropbox goes out of Amazon S3 and manages it in-house, but it also involves danger. Compared to Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, which is responsible for cloud services, Dropbox is small and we do not know if we can continue to manage our storage and generate profits.


However, it seems that employees of Dropbox grasp the decision this time favorably and there is no pressure.


It will draw attention to what kind of path Dropbox which has escaped from Amazon will follow, the movement over the next several years.