>>Mm. Welcome back to the cubes. Continuous coverage of A W s reinvent 2021 were running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year with A W S and its ecosystem partners. And, of course, special thanks to a M D for supporting this year's editorial coverage at the event we got to live sets we had to remote sets one in Boston, one in Palo Alto. We've got more than 100 guests coming on the programme and we're looking >>deep into >>the next decade of cloud innovation. We're super excited to be joined by Ali Zafar, who is the senior director of platform strategy and operations at Dropbox Ali. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Awesome. It's a pleasure to be here with you, Dave. >>So Hey, what's your day job like at Dropbox? What's your role? >>Got it? Yeah. So I actually oversee the global supply chain at Dropbox. Also all of the capacity planning which entails both our budget and also capacity requirements and Dropbox. And then I also focus on the platform product management side which is basically building our build vs buy and our overall roadmap for our platform in the long run. >>Great. Thank you. So I mean, everybody knows Dropbox, But maybe you can talk a little bit about your business, your mission and how that's evolved. Over the past several years. >>Dropbox is a global collaboration platform, and our mission at Dropbox is to help design a more enlightened way of working. Dropbox has over 700 million registered users and over 550 billion pieces of content. So taking a step back, they've dropbox health. Let's use all of your content. Think of this as videos as music. Even your tax returns allows you to organise all of this content. And then you can share this content with anybody at any time. You can also take Dropbox to work. And actually, it makes you even more productive in the workplace integrating all of your tools seamlessly, also allowing you to collaborate with all of your teams internally and also externally. >>Yeah, so thank you. Uh, when Dropbox was founded, I mean, the cloud was really nascent, right? So it was early days, and so a lot has changed since you know, the mid last decade. And of course, with remote work and hybrid work that had to be a real tailwind to your business. But maybe you could explain your cloud and your hybrid cloud strategy. >>You're spot on Dave. So Dropbox has always been hybrid since its inception in 2000 and seven. And when I say hybrid, I mean, we have our own on prime infrastructure, and then we also leverage Public Cloud. Now, Public cloud still to these days remains absolutely critical for Dropbox to serve all of its customer needs. And when we talk about the decision between public or private, we think about three or four key things. One is the total cost of ownership. Look at the market. We also look at our customer requirements and the latest technology that's available in the market and then any international data storage requirements to make the decision of going towards public or private for that specific use case. >>So what if we could follow up on that? Like maybe you can talk about the key business, these conditions as a as a SAS storage provider? What are the real drivers in in your business framework? >>Got it at the end of the day, what really matters for us. There is to actually think about our customers and delight them And what better than to focus on performance, reliability and also security. Right. So we want to make sure that the infrastructure that we have today allows Dropbox to actually solve for the specific use case for our customers. What do they care about while also doing this in a very efficient management Manage, uh, way So to summarise that looking at performance, looking at liability, looking at scalability, looking at efficiency and then also compliance >>So that leads me to My next question is about the EC two instances that you use. I know you. You make heavy use of AMG compute. How >>did you >>come to that decision? Was that these factors was all performance. How did you migrate to really enable that capability? How complex was that? >>MD has has been a key strategic partners the partnership as well over 4 to 5 years right now and we've been leveraging them on our on prem infrastructure for compute. So we've always had aimed in our infrastructure. And when the time came where aws was also leveraging some of the MD instances, we wanted to see how we can expand the partnership with AMG and A W S and also experiment with these instances. So we looked at some of the tooling updates that were required. We also looked at specific instances which are either compute optimised and memory optimised instances. And then we actually build our footprint on M D. And what we saw is that the overall performance improvements and also cost improvements that we got for specific workloads. It was actually extremely, uh, overall awesome results for Dropbox and our customers, and we have been using them ever since. >>What kind of business impact did that make that make a difference to your business? That was noticeable >>on the business side, I think primarily it was more on the TCO side, which is where we got most of the benefits on the cost side. Um, and then also for some of our internal work clothes, we also saw benefit, uh, to our internal developers that are using some of those work clothes. >>Well, so you guys have kind of become the poster child for hybrid. A lot has been talked about about you all, but I wonder if you could help us understand what part of your infrastructure is going to be better served by public cloud versus kind of doing your own. I t on Prem. What are some of the value drivers that are that are making, you know, push workloads into the public cloud? Help us understand that better and squint through that >>got ready. I get asked that question a lot. So public cloud in general allows for faster go to market, Think about this as, like product launches teacher launches also international expansion. It allows us to scale and then also leveraging some of the existing technologies out there in the market for some of the common workloads. So just, you know, taking a step back and thinking about Dropbox. We keep on evaluating also the criteria and then also specific workloads on what makes sense on private or public load. And a W s had some instances, like as three rds and EC to that when we started looking at, we knew that some of our key services, like data platform, some parts of our, um, Melania and even paper platform would make more sense for us to actually leverage. Uh, some of these in public cloud for that. >>So what are the sort of characteristics of the workload that are sort of better suited to be in AWS? You know, what's the ideal workload profile? You know, we talk about ideal customer profile. What's the ideal workload profile for the for the AWS Cloud. >>Got it. So the way we think about it, at least we call it the rule of three at Dropbox. Um, and that means we look at scale. First, we look at technology and innovation. Um, and what I mean by that is, is there faster innovation in the public cloud? And is the workload common enough that there's already a lot of work going on in public Cloud? Then there's no reason for us to actually innovate faster than that. We probably can't. And if the scale is not large enough, right? So when we talk about our storage side like magic pocket, the scale is large enough. We're innovating. There makes sense, and it's better for the end customer, so we will probably go towards private cloud there. But then, when we talk about like international expansion, when we talk about, like, faster go to market or some of the innovation in the space. It really makes sense to use public Cloud because of all of the advancements that we've seen there. >>Yeah, so let me circle back to the sort of business benefits and impact of the sort of a MD based compute specifically. But you talked about TCO before. So there's certain things you mentioned on Prem you sometimes use You mean right. If the thing is hardened, you don't want to necessarily rip and replace it. But if you can accelerate, go to market and you spin up things in the cloud that makes sense. You mentioned customer requirements. So that's just kind of depends. And then the international expansion and scale. So it kind of comes down to those whatever. Four or five factors, right? Tco those other factors that I mentioned kind of the high level benefits, if you could, wouldn't mind summarising for us. Ali. >>Yeah, I think you're spot on there. So it's looking at the overall Decio, right? The cost of serving the overall cloud looking at like go to market in general, like can we leverage public cloud and go to market faster? Obviously, meeting that end customer requirements. We also looked at like international expansion, like any of the customer's data that is stored outside of the US is all on public load for Dropbox. Uh, no plans in the short term to do something different there, Um and then also just looking at, like I mentioned anything in the technology space that is ongoing, that we can leverage features side or the product side for our customers, like at Yale or, uh, VRML. We are going to leverage Public cloud there. >>So of course you know we've we've followed the progression of semiconductor technology for decades. This industry has marched to the cadence of performance improvements. What are the one of the futures hold from a technology roadmap standpoint, particularly as it relates to leveraging AMG EC Two instances, Ali >>got it. So drop boxes in a very unique position where we actually leverage AMG both on Prem and for public le leveraging some of the AWS EC two instances like like you mentioned and epic processors from MDR what we're using today, both on the hybrid infrastructure site and the performance and also the d. C o benefits are real and something that we are observing on a day to day basis. So we are gonna be leveraging that technology even in the future. Um, and the partnership with the MD continues to be very, very strong for Dropbox. >>Well, I really, really appreciate you coming on the cube as part of our coverage is great to have You love to have you back sometime. >>Awesome. Thank you. And also just last thing we wanted to also call out that we are also going to be experimenting with probably Milan that is coming out. Uh, room is the current process is from a m D. That we have been leveraging. And as Milan comes available, we do wanna continue to evaluate it and see how we can fit it in our infrastructure. >>Okay, So their their generations are city based, the all Italian city based. They were going to run out of cities soon. >>God, uh, again, the partnership with both A W s and an M. D is something that I'm very proud of. Execution. Thank you, Dave. >>Great to have you, Ali. And really appreciate you watching. Keep it right there for more action on the cube. Your leader in hybrid tech event coverage. Mhm.