Stanford
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2014–2023
1:08:17 · 372K views · Sep 10, 2012
Dropbox engineer Kevin Modzelewski gives a Stanford colloquium on Dropbox's history and the technical problems it faced scaling, including detailed database schema decisions.
Recommended as a detailed, candid case study of scaling a real system from zero users to millions.
8 comments from Hacker News
I found the Dropbox lecture [1] at Stanford one of the most riveting things ever. There is just so much technology behind Dropbox, it is staggering. There is a reason why it is so much better than iCloud sync, Google Drive, Box or OneDrive. [1] this video
Applications dont really need to be well architected until they are hitting scale. Then the parts of their system that need to relieve pressure will need to be re-architected. This is almost like a case study and there are a lot of good talks on youtube from places like dropbox and facebook that explain the problem and solution. Example: this video If you dont want to do youtube case studies there are also books to read about distributed systems. Also reading about cloud architecture can help.
imo the best way is to look at what other's have built. Here's some of my favorite talks that go from 0 users to millions. Dropbox - this video Instagram - [LINK] Slack (bonus. not as applicable but good reminder of why initial architecture does matter) - [LINK]
Dropbox is a lot more than a GUI on top of rsync. Even purely from an engineering standpoint (ignoring product & design) that's incorrect. You might enjoy this talk: this video
This is a talk about the evolution of Dropbox's architecture from 2012: this video . It is incredibly detailed (down to the exact sql schema they use for file metadata etc).