Dropbox Inc. was the first widely adopted cloud collaboration platform, freeing files from the confines of the network to be shared across the cloud. It also broke ahead of the pack in choosing a hybrid cloud model from its inception.

“Dropbox has always been hybrid,” said Ali Zafar (pictured), senior director of platform strategy and operations at Dropbox. “We have our own on-prem infrastructure, and then we also leverage public cloud.”

Zafar spoke with Dave Vellante, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed Dropbox’s partnership with Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Amazon Web Services Inc. and how the company evaluates what workloads should be in the public cloud. (* Disclosure below.)

Public cloud is best for go-to-market speed

Public cloud is critical for Dropbox to serve its customers’ needs, but on-premises is also an important factor in keeping costs down and security high. There are several key factors when deciding what goes into the public cloud, according to Zafar, including total cost of ownership , go-to-market strategy, customer requirements, the latest market technology, and international data storage requirements.

“Public cloud, in general, allows for faster go-to-market,” Zafar said. “Think about this as like product launches, feature launches, also international expansion. It allows us to scale and then also leverage some of the existing technologies out there in the market for some of the common workloads.”

AMD and AWS are both key strategic partners for Dropbox, with the company leveraging AMD’s EPYC processors in its infrastructure. So when AWS and AMD collaborated to offer AMD-based instances in Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (or EC2), Dropbox was eager to experiment, according to Zafar.

“We looked at some of the tooling updates that were required. We also looked at specific instances, which are compute-optimized and memory-optimized instances, and then we built our footprint on AMD,” Zafar said.

Both Dropbox and its end users benefitted from the change, as overall performance improvement was coupled with cost reduction. These are “awesome results,” especially when it comes to the total cost of ownership, according to Zafar.

“The TCO benefits are real and something that we are observing on a day-to-day basis,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Advanced Micro Devices Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AMD nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE