Shhh! DropBox 'quietly files' for IPO DropBox has reportedly filed for an IPO, giving it fresh capital to fund a significant expansion. Bloomberg has reported that DropBox has lodged confidential papers registering for a public share offering. "Confidential offerings" were introduced in 2012 in the JOBS Act, allowing companies to perform a fund-raising roadshow …
Or put another way, whether Amazon is willing to cede any of its cost advantages to some retail brand.
Not really because still always pay for what you provision. If you know your requirements well enough then doing your own hosting can be a lot cheaper than Amazon which has to charge a premium because it provisions more.
Going with a provider like Amazon for this kind of service also leaves you at their mercy: you cannot really use the market as you might like as migrating several TB or EB of data to another provider doesn't happen at the drop of a hat.
Well, not strictly - I mean in the case of Dropbox where they merely used S3 for object storage, but metadata etc was on their own servers, they could have presumably moved an object and then updated the pointer to that particular object to its new home, be it a new S3 bucket, a new S3 region, a new S3-alike provider, or their own infrastructure. The delete from the original location could then take place later.
Then, once tested, you could migrate across in a number of ways - new files written to the new storage, older files moved across in the background.
Of course the migration will have a fee; the bandwidth egress charges from your old provider are going to be pretty high due to the migration!
What you're suggesting would add considerable complexity to the application with little direct upside if storage was really fungible; it isn't which why the real market is in application deployment. Quite a lot of risk and storage itself has become largely commodified: EB can be added relatively quickly.
But they no doubt have contigency plans that rely on something similar should their own storage systems have problems.
Nicely foreseen, Sir!
On 4 October 2017, Charlie Clark responded to an article about DropBox's logo change, with this:
"It's the sort of thing that happens when logos need to be used in monochrome for official documents, like SEC filings…"
Either the pint is being pulled wrong, or the keg has been overgassed…
Actually, it's me misremembering Rambling Syd Rumpo who said something along the lines of "charge your thunder jugs with foaming nut brown ale".
Take it up with the late, great Kenneth Williams if you dare.
Of course, only poofy Southerners drink beer without a decent head! That and other wanky affectations such as drinking in a straight glass, beautifully illustrated in opening scene of "Get Carter".
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