Dropbox just unveiled its own custom-built infrastructure, where the company stores and serves their users’ data.
“With more than half a billion users and over 500 petabytes of data (over 60 times the data stored in the Library of Congress), the company is continuing to invest heavily in building the very best collaboration tools to simplify peoples’ lives,” a spokesperson tells WebProNews.
The company says with its new infrastructure it’s storing and serving over 90% of user data. In all, Dropbox stores two kinds of data: file content and metadata about files and users.
“We’ve always had a hybrid cloud architecture, hosting metadata and our web servers in data centers we manage, and storing file content on Amazon,” explains Dropbox’s Akhil Gupta in a blog post. “We were an early adopter of Amazon S3, which provided us with the ability to scale our operations rapidly and reliably. Amazon Web Services has, and continues to be, an invaluable partner—we couldn’t have grown as fast as we did without a service like AWS. As the needs of our users and customers kept growing, we decided to invest seriously in building our own in-house storage system.”
The company says having its own custom infrastructure enables it to improve performance for its own use case and that it enables them to leverage their scale to customize hardware and software, and “provide better unit economics.”
More on how Dropbox put this together can be found here.
Image via Dropbox