In other words, the cloud giant helps the Dropbox platform be a lot more distributed than it would have been had it relied on its own three data centers in California, Texas, and Virginia alone. (Dropbox now stores about 10 percent of all its data in AWS). Amazon data centers in Europe and in those places around the US where Dropbox doesn’t have its own facilities store data that needs to be close to users. AWS made it possible for a startup the size Dropbox was a decade ago to grow its business without having to do that.Īnd there are still some things AWS does that Dropbox finds valuable enough to continue using it. It takes years and years of engineering and tons of cash to build a cloud platform of your own. Related: Oracle to Launch 12 Cloud Data Centers Around the WorldĬost isn’t the only reason companies use cloud services of course. There’s some margin somewhere.” In other words, if you’re paying to use someone else’s infrastructure, you’re paying more for that infrastructure than its lowest possible cost by default. The initiative, referred to (rather modestly) in the company’s S-1 SEC form as Infrastructure Optimization, included designing custom hardware and all the software that would tie it – and whatever AWS infrastructure Dropbox still uses – together into a single, highly distributed computing platform.Īs the company’s CTO and former Facebook engineer Aditya Agarwal told Wired back in 2016, “Nobody is running a cloud business as a charity. Related: Different Folks: Selling Google to the CIO That’s 15 percent of the $500 million it currently plans to raise in the public offering.

Over two years, it turns out, Dropbox shaved $74.6 million off its operational expenses primarily because of the move. In those documents, it disclosed the impact the move has had on its bottom line. Last week, the popular cloud storage and collaboration service filed documents for an IPO.

About two years ago, Dropbox moved most of its data – including users’ data – from Amazon Web Services, which it had relied on since its founding, to its own custom infrastructure in colocation data centers.

Dropbox enterprise cost