But some companies get so big, it actually makes sense to build their own network with their own custom tech and, yes, abandon the cloud. Amazon and Google and Microsoft can keep cloud prices low, thanks to economies of scale. But they aren't selling their services at cost. "Nobody is running a cloud business as a charity," says Dropbox vice president of engineering and ex-Facebooker Aditya Agarwal. "There is some margin somewhere." If you're big enough, you can save tremendous amounts of money by cutting out the cloud and all the other fat. Dropbox says it's now that big.
Dropbox is now at petabyte scale. Last I had a conversation with someone at Dropbox they mentioned they’re moving storage in-house but still use quite a bit of AWS for service.
I think hybrid totally makes sense where you take the most expensive part bare metal with limited scope of maintenance.
1 PB is $23k per month on S3. It's nothing. That's barely the costs of 1-2 employees in SV.
The migration itself would take a lot more effort than one dude, even if there was a solution for completely free storage out there, the migration could only result in a huge net loss.
https://www.wired.com/2016/03/epic-story-dropboxs-exodus-ama...
But some companies get so big, it actually makes sense to build their own network with their own custom tech and, yes, abandon the cloud. Amazon and Google and Microsoft can keep cloud prices low, thanks to economies of scale. But they aren't selling their services at cost. "Nobody is running a cloud business as a charity," says Dropbox vice president of engineering and ex-Facebooker Aditya Agarwal. "There is some margin somewhere." If you're big enough, you can save tremendous amounts of money by cutting out the cloud and all the other fat. Dropbox says it's now that big.