Williams admitted that when it comes to making a decision like this, there are always concessions, but in the end the trade-offs were worth it to them. Ultimately though the company was willing to make this massive move because it craved control over its infrastructure. And that small team had to build the backbone and move all of that the content, all while keeping the service up and running. “What’s neat about the backbone is that it’s similar to something you might find at Google or Facebook, but we built this with a relatively small team,” Dan Williams, head of production engineering at Dropbox told TechCrunch. When you open Dropbox and request a file, you want your file to download pretty much instantaneously without latency, and it was up to the team to ensure that happened, while trying to navigate between the old system and the new one. It also meant building the network backbone, the infrastructure that facilitated the connections between the US data centers and other facilities they had located throughout the world.

That included building and equipping three US data centers. This was not a huge operation, yet what they were trying to do was build something themselves at web scale that only a small number of companies with much larger teams had tried to this point.

We’re talking about a company that had 1500 employees, with just around a dozen on the infrastructure team. The first step was building the infrastructure to replace it. When they made the transition, they had to move an epic 500 petabytes - that’s five followed by 17 zeros - that had been sitting on AWS servers. The latest numbers are 500 million users and 200,000 business customers.

As you can imagine, it took a monumental effort, but the company believed that the advantages of controlling its own destiny would be worth all of the challenges they faced to get there.įor starters, a company like Dropbox is dealing with a huge number of customers storing an enormous amount of data. A few years ago Dropbox decided it was going to move the majority of its infrastructure requirements from AWS into its own data centers. There is always a tension inside companies about whether to build or to buy, whatever the need.

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