(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to "The Cube's" continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We're running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. And of course, special thanks to AMD for supporting this year's editorial coverage at the event. We got two live sets. We had two remote sets, one in Boston and one in Palo Alto. We got more than 100 guests coming on the program, and we're looking deep into the next decade of cloud innovation. We're super excited to be joined by Ali Zafar, who's 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 and what's your role? >> Got it. 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 at Dropbox. And then I also focus on the platform product management side, which is basically building our build versus buy and our overall roadmap for our platform in the long run. >> Great, thank you. So, everybody knows Dropbox, but maybe you could talk a little bit about your business, your mission, and how that's evolved over the past several years. >> Got it. So 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 Dave, Dropbox helps with all of your content. Think of this as videos as music, even your tax returns, allows you to organize 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. >> Thank you, Ali. When Dropbox was founded, the cloud was really nascent, right? So it was early days, and so a lot has changed since the mid last decade. And of course with remote work and hybrid work, that's had to be a real tailwind to your business, but maybe you could explain your cloud and your hybrid cloud strategy. >> Got it, you're spot on Dave. So Dropbox has always been hybrid since its inception in 2007. And when I say hybrid, I mean we have our own on-prem 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, we look at go-to-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, I wonder if we could follow up on that. Maybe you could talk about the key business considerations as an SAS storage provider. What are the real drivers and in your business framework? >> Got it. At the end of the day, what really matters for us Dave, 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 this specific use case for our customers. You know, what do they care about? While also doing this in a very efficient, managed way. So to summarize 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 EC2 instances that you use. I know you make heavy use of AMD compute. How did you come to that decision? Was it these factors? Was it all performance? How did you migrate to really enable that capability? How complex was that? >> Got it. So AMD has always been our key strategic partners partners. The partnership is well over four to five years right now, and we've been leveraging them on our on-prem infrastructure for compute. So we've always had AMD in our infrastructure and when the time came where AWS was also leveraging some of the AMD instances, we wanted to see how we can expand the partnership with AMD and AWS 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 optimized and memory optimized instances, and then we actually built our footprint on AMD. And what we saw is that the overall performance improvement and also cost improvements that we got per specific workloads was actually extremely, was overall awesome results for Dropbox and our end customers. And we have been using them ever since. >> What kind of business impact did that make? Did it 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. And then also for some of our internal workloads, we also saw benefit to our internal developers that are using some of those workloads. >> So, you guys have become the poster child for hybrid and 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 doing your own I T on-prem. What are some of the value drivers that are making you push workloads into the public cloud? Help us understand that better and squint through that. >> Got it, 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, feature 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 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 cloud. And AWS had some instances like S3 RDS and EC2 that when we started looking at, we knew that some of our key services like data platform, some parts of the MLN A I, and even paper platform would make more sense for us to actually leverage some of these in a public cloud for that. >> So what are the characteristics of the workload that are better suited to be an AWS? What's the ideal workload profile? You know, we talk about ideal customer profile. What's the ideal workload profile for the AWS cloud? >> Got it, so the way we think about it, at least, we call it the rule of three at Dropbox. And that means we look at scale first, we look at technology and innovation and what I mean by that is, is there a faster innovation in the public cloud and is that 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. So when we talk about our storage side, like magic pocket, the scale is large enough where innovating there makes sense and it's better for the end customer. So we would probably go towards private cloud there. But then when we talk about international expansion, when we talk about faster go-to-market or some of the innovation in the MLN A I space, it really makes sense to use public cloud because of all of the advancements that we've seen there. >> So let me circle back to the business benefits and impact of the AMD based compute specifically, but you talked about TCO before, so there's certain things you mentioned on-prem you sometimes use. If the thing's 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 just kind of depends. And then the international expansion and scale. So it comes down to those whatever four or five factors, right? The TCO, those other factors that I mentioned. Kind of the high level benefits, if you wouldn't mind summarizing for us, Ali. >> Yeah, I think you're spot on there. So there's looking at the overall TCO, right? The cost of serving the overall cloud, looking at go-to-market in general, can we leverage public cloud and go-to-market faster, obviously meeting our end customer requirements. We also looked at international expansion, any of the customer's data that is stored outside of the U S is all on public cloud for Dropbox. No plans in the short term to do something different there. And then also just looking at, like I mentioned, anything in the technology space that is ongoing, that we can leverage feature side or the product side for our customers, like A I or M L, we are going to leverage public cloud there. >> So of course you know, we've followed the progression of semiconductor technology for decades. This industry is marched to the cadence of performance improvements. What do the futures hold from a technology roadmap standpoint, and particularly as it relates to leveraging AMD EC2 instances, Ali? >> Got it. So Dropbox is in a very unique position where we actually leverage AMD both on-prem and for public cloud, leveraging some of the AWS EC2 instances like you mentioned. And EPYC processors from AMD are what we're using today, both on the hybrid infrastructure side and the performance. And also the TCO benefits are real and something that we are observing on a day-to-day basis. So we are going to be leveraging that technology even in the future, and the partnership with the AMD continues to be very, very strong for Dropbox. >> Well, Ali, I really appreciate you coming on "The Cube" as part of our coverage. It's 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. Rome is the current processors from AMD that we have been leveraging and as Milan comes available, we do want to continue to evaluate it and see how we can fit it in our infrastructure. >> So their are generations are city-based. Are they all Italian city-based, or are we going to run out of cities soon? (both laughing) >> Got it. Again, the partnership with both AWS and AMD is something that I'm very proud of. >> Excellent. >> Thank you so much. 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. (calm music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to "The Cube's" continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. We're running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. And of course, special thanks to AMD for supporting this year's editorial coverage at the event. We got two live sets. We had two remote sets, one in Boston and one in Palo Alto. We got more than 100 guests coming on the program, and we're looking deep into the next decade of cloud innovation. We're super excited to be joined by Ali Zafar, who's 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 and what's your role? >> Got it. 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 at Dropbox. And then I also focus on the platform product management side, which is basically building our build versus buy and our overall roadmap for our platform in the long run. >> Great, thank you. So, everybody knows Dropbox, but maybe you could talk a little bit about your business, your mission, and how that's evolved over the past several years. >> Got it. So 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 Dave, Dropbox helps with all of your content. Think of this as videos as music, even your tax returns, allows you to organize 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. >> Thank you, Ali. When Dropbox was founded, the cloud was really nascent, right? So it was early days, and so a lot has changed since the mid last decade. And of course with remote work and hybrid work, that's had to be a real tailwind to your business, but maybe you could explain your cloud and your hybrid cloud strategy. >> Got it, you're spot on Dave. So Dropbox has always been hybrid since its inception in 2007. And when I say hybrid, I mean we have our own on-prem 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, we look at go-to-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, I wonder if we could follow up on that. Maybe you could talk about the key business considerations as an SAS storage provider. What are the real drivers and in your business framework? >> Got it. At the end of the day, what really matters for us Dave, 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 this specific use case for our customers. You know, what do they care about? While also doing this in a very efficient, managed way. So to summarize 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 EC2 instances that you use. I know you make heavy use of AMD compute. How did you come to that decision? Was it these factors? Was it all performance? How did you migrate to really enable that capability? How complex was that? >> Got it. So AMD has always been our key strategic partners partners. The partnership is well over four to five years right now, and we've been leveraging them on our on-prem infrastructure for compute. So we've always had AMD in our infrastructure and when the time came where AWS was also leveraging some of the AMD instances, we wanted to see how we can expand the partnership with AMD and AWS 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 optimized and memory optimized instances, and then we actually built our footprint on AMD. And what we saw is that the overall performance improvement and also cost improvements that we got per specific workloads was actually extremely, was overall awesome results for Dropbox and our end customers. And we have been using them ever since. >> What kind of business impact did that make? Did it 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. And then also for some of our internal workloads, we also saw benefit to our internal developers that are using some of those workloads. >> So, you guys have become the poster child for hybrid and 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 doing your own I T on-prem. What are some of the value drivers that are making you push workloads into the public cloud? Help us understand that better and squint through that. >> Got it, 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, feature 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 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 cloud. And AWS had some instances like S3 RDS and EC2 that when we started looking at, we knew that some of our key services like data platform, some parts of the MLN A I, and even paper platform would make more sense for us to actually leverage some of these in a public cloud for that. >> So what are the characteristics of the workload that are better suited to be an AWS? What's the ideal workload profile? You know, we talk about ideal customer profile. What's the ideal workload profile for the AWS cloud? >> Got it, so the way we think about it, at least, we call it the rule of three at Dropbox. And that means we look at scale first, we look at technology and innovation and what I mean by that is, is there a faster innovation in the public cloud and is that 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. So when we talk about our storage side, like magic pocket, the scale is large enough where innovating there makes sense and it's better for the end customer. So we would probably go towards private cloud there. But then when we talk about international expansion, when we talk about faster go-to-market or some of the innovation in the MLN A I space, it really makes sense to use public cloud because of all of the advancements that we've seen there. >> So let me circle back to the business benefits and impact of the AMD based compute specifically, but you talked about TCO before, so there's certain things you mentioned on-prem you sometimes use. If the thing's 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 just kind of depends. And then the international expansion and scale. So it comes down to those whatever four or five factors, right? The TCO, those other factors that I mentioned. Kind of the high level benefits, if you wouldn't mind summarizing for us, Ali. >> Yeah, I think you're spot on there. So there's looking at the overall TCO, right? The cost of serving the overall cloud, looking at go-to-market in general, can we leverage public cloud and go-to-market faster, obviously meeting our end customer requirements. We also looked at international expansion, any of the customer's data that is stored outside of the U S is all on public cloud for Dropbox. No plans in the short term to do something different there. And then also just looking at, like I mentioned, anything in the technology space that is ongoing, that we can leverage feature side or the product side for our customers, like A I or M L, we are going to leverage public cloud there. >> So of course you know, we've followed the progression of semiconductor technology for decades. This industry is marched to the cadence of performance improvements. What do the futures hold from a technology roadmap standpoint, and particularly as it relates to leveraging AMD EC2 instances, Ali? >> Got it. So Dropbox is in a very unique position where we actually leverage AMD both on-prem and for public cloud, leveraging some of the AWS EC2 instances like you mentioned. And EPYC processors from AMD are what we're using today, both on the hybrid infrastructure side and the performance. And also the TCO benefits are real and something that we are observing on a day-to-day basis. So we are going to be leveraging that technology even in the future, and the partnership with the AMD continues to be very, very strong for Dropbox. >> Well, Ali, I really appreciate you coming on "The Cube" as part of our coverage. It's 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. Rome is the current processors from AMD that we have been leveraging and as Milan comes available, we do want to continue to evaluate it and see how we can fit it in our infrastructure. >> So their are generations are city-based. Are they all Italian city-based, or are we going to run out of cities soon? (both laughing) >> Got it. Again, the partnership with both AWS and AMD is something that I'm very proud of. >> Excellent. >> Thank you so much. 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. (calm music)