> We killed the project after more than nine months of active work. As an engineer, it is not easy to give up something you have been trying to make work for so long. Some of the early conversations were controversial but ultimately everyone agreed killing the project was the right decision for Dropbox and our users.
They found the solution did not work once deployed to be tested in staging. Being able to walk away from that sunk cost is of merit.
They don’t provide that much info on why Erasure coding didn’t work out for them. I’m curious to see how Backblaze will handle something similar while they scale up now that they’re goin to have multiple data centers (2 in US and 1 in EU).
They found the solution did not work once deployed to be tested in staging. Being able to walk away from that sunk cost is of merit.