Dropbox turned heads when it announced last year it had migrated 90 percent of its storage off of Amazon Web Services and onto a homegrown, global network.
The company's explosive growth—it now counts more than 500 million users and 500 petabytes—had been enabled by AWS's Simple Storage Service, but a few years ago Dropbox came to believe that it had to create its own system in the name of continued performance and customization.
Dropbox didn't stop at building a global storage system, as VP of infrastructure Raghav Bhargava revealed in a detailed blog post this week. Rather, over the past year it has made dramatic investments in an edge-oriented, private network infrastructure that it says is speeding up performance and cutting costs significantly.
We’ve built a network across 14 cities in seven countries on three continents. In doing so, we’ve added hundreds of gigabits of Internet connectivity with transit providers (regional and global ISPs), and hundreds of new peering partners (where we exchange traffic directly rather than through an ISP). We also designed a custom-built edge-proxy architecture into our network.
The edge proxy is a stack of servers that act as the first gateway for TLS & TCP handshake for users and is deployed in PoPs (points of presence) to improve the performance for a user accessing Dropbox from any part of the globe. We evaluated some more standard offerings (CDNs and other “cloud” products) but for our specific needs this custom solution was best. Some users have seen and have increased sync speeds by as much as 300 percent, and performance has improved across the board.
Compare that to 2014, when Dropbox's network was confined to the US, with just two data centers. This was a problem, since 75 percent of Dropbox users reside outside the US.
Much of Bhargava's post is a deep dive into the technical details of Dropbox's network buildout, one that defies easy summary here but is well worth a read.
At a high level, Dropbox's big gamble on going it alone has apparently paid off. The new network architecture has raised median download speeds for some European users by 40 percent and upload speeds by 90 percent. It's working even better in Japan, with download speeds doubling and upload speeds tripling. Dropbox has also cut its non-US networking costs by 50 percent.
By the end of 2017, Dropbox will have an infrastructure presence in 25 facilities across 10 countries and four continents. It is
"Moore's Law has aided software across the whole stack—the only exceptions are battery life and network performance," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "So it is crucial for vendors at scale to improve their network performance, especially with edge and routing -elated strategy. Network quality results in user productivity and good user experience, so it's a key area for investment."
While Dropbox's requirements dwarf those of most enterprises and cloud software vendors, its decision to move off the public Internet—and how it did so—nonetheless stands as a valuable case study that could well prove influential in the coming months and years.
24/7 Access to Constellation Insights
Subscribe today for unrestricted access to expert analyst views on breaking news.