As a private company that is about to go in to a public IPO, saving costs was obviously high on their agenda. Given the unique use case they have for block storage at extremely high scale, by designing a tailor-made cloud storage solution of their own engineered to provide maximum performance at the lowest unit cost, Dropbox was planning on saving a significant amount of operational costs. Dropbox states 2 unique reasons behind this decision: Performance requirements and the raw storage costs. As such, Dropbox decided to bring this file storage back in to their own data center on-premises. However, as their data storage requirements grew, the necessity to change this architecture was starting to outweigh the benefits such as the agility and ease provided by leveraging AWS cloud storage. When they first went live, Dropbox used AWS’s S3 storage (PaaS) to store the actual user file data behind the scene, while their own web servers were used to host the metadata about those files and users. During this process of data synchronisation and content sharing, they are dealing with, If, however you’ve been under a rock for the past 4 years, Dropbox is the pioneering tech organisation from the Silicon Valley that built an online content sharing and a collaboration platform that allows you to synchronise content between various end user devices automatically while letting you access them on any device, anywhere. I don’t think it’s necessary to introduce Dropbox to anyone these days. This post summarises what I learnt from the Dropbox team. Given it’s the first time their engineering team openly discussed things, I was looking forward to talking their engineering team at the event. So, when I learned that they have designed and built their own Software Defined Storage solution to bring back most of their data storage from AWS on to their on data centres, I was quite curious to find out more details of the said platform and the reasoning behind the move back to on-premises. Heck, they are even referenced in some of the AWS training courses I’ve come across on Pluralsight that talk about Drobox’s ingenious way of using AWS S3 storage behind the scene to store file data content. etc to little known start-ups and Dropbox’s name is often mentioned in event keynote speeches, case studies…etc by most of these vendors as a perfect example of how a born in the cloud organisation can use modern technology efficiently. I work with various technology vendors, from large vendors like Microsoft, Amazon, VMware, Cisco, NetApp…. (perhaps ecstatic is an understatement!). So, when I was informed that not only Dropbox would be presenting at the SFD15, but we’d also get to tour their state of the art data center, I was ecstatic. Dropbox is one of the poster boys of the modern-day tech start-ups, similar to the Uber’s and the Netflix’s of the world that was founded by engineers using their engineering prowess to help consumers around the world address various day to day challenges using technologies in a novel way.
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