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Comment by colesantiago | Hacker News Reader

Oof.

You're not wrong, this is really really bad, especially for Dropbox, storage is their business so I expected way better.

These stats are no different to S3 at all. All of this engineering and moving away from AWS and for so few gain in availability.

I was initially excited when they moved away from AWS and expected industry leading higher availability when they moved away, but I was wrong.

This is disappointing for Dropbox which this is their main business, storing files without any minor hiccups or outages for years.

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"... storage is their business so I expected way better."

Storage is our business and we target an even worse 99.95% availability[1].

Availability has a cost. That cost is complexity.

We would very much prefer to have boring outages more often than have fascinating outages very rarely.

[1] https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/sla.html

> Availability has a cost. That cost is complexity.

It seems that Dropbox's system is complex enough but still isn't as designed to be highly available (5x9s) as a well architected system on AWS using S3.

Yet It is surprising a public billion dollar company like Dropbox cannot go beyond this for their mission critical customers (govt agencies, healthcare, military, etc) willing to spend hundreds of millions.

So yes, I expected way better.

> These stats are no different to S3 at all. All of this engineering and moving away from AWS and for so few gain in availability.

What makes you think a gain in availability matters or is necessarily a motivation for the project?

If they can achieve the same availability at far lower cost, it’s a win for them, which is why they would (and did) do it.

> What makes you think a gain in availability matters or is necessarily a motivation for the project?

This isn't a win for enterprise / business / mission critical customers. Governments and public services cannot use this at all.

They can, and do.

They use AWS more than the unreliability of Dropbox.

You think 9-1-1 doesn't experience downtime?

Strawman. Who said that emergency systems don't ever experience downtime? Orgs using mission critical systems would trust a service that has less than 5x9s.

> Emergency response systems is 99.999% or “five nines” – or about five minutes and 15 seconds of downtime per year.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/achieving-five-nin...

I see hospitals will be using AWS and other reliable hosts to use S3 rather than Dropbox.

Hospitals have budgets too, not all of them will spring for the 5th 9

And AWS is there for the 5th 9, not Dropbox. therefore, Dropbox is not suitable or reliable for these kind of orgs, even with this custom built system they built.

One can have a custom built or an experienced IT team using AWS and achieve the same or even better availability using AWS and other providers that care about critical availability, if architected correctly.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/wellarchitected/latest/reliabili...

The propaganda is wild to make people believe governments and public services have even 99% uptime, let alone 99.99%.

5x9s is more than possible and has been done. not propaganda, don't know what you've been reading.

Yes 5x9s is possible. No, governments and utilities services do not keep 5x9s.

this is an overreaction. Dropbox is mostly storing files that are already stored on the customer's device, so customers usually won't notice an outage.

How is this an overreaction?

I would expect Dropbox, a file storage company that proudly invests heavily in tech and infrastructure to achieve a better availability than what they already were on AWS (99.99%)

In terms of availability the change is pretty much 0 and as a business / enterprise customer I might as well choose a different service with similar or higher 9s or (if my needs are complex) choose S3.

Can you provide an example of an alternative service which will give higher than 4 nines for availability that an enterprise customer would pick instead if that < 1hr of downtime per year was too high?

AWS (Architected Correctly) which I am sure Dropbox has experience in.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/achieving-five-nin...

Here is a service that has managed to achieve 5x9s of availability:

https://ably.com/

> achieve 5x9s of availability:

Guaranteed availability is a bet they're willing to make, a gamble they've been on top of so far, a risk that, should something fail, they will pay out on according to their SLA.

Seems to be working out for them (Ably) and this isn't a public billion dollar company like Dropbox.

I would have thought that given Dropbox's engineering talent, they would have designed a system that would account for 5x9s and even making that guarantee for enterprise or mission critical customers.

Can't even find their SLAs anywhere for these customers, so I presume that Dropbox doesn't care about them.

Guess I was wrong and this is just disappointing and made the move not worth it.

I'd rather have maximum consistency and integrity than maximum availability.

Most tech these days have improved to offer maximum consistency, availability is also important, which is why it is a good thing that Dropbox still trusts AWS and especially S3, better than their own on-prem solution.

https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/dropbox-s3/

Do you know of any companies that actually provide better reliability in their consumer product? The ones that lie or skew their uptime calculation don't count.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35979536

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