The Infoq Podcast

As InfoQ previously reported in March 2016, Dropbox announced that they had migrated away from Amazon Web Services (AWS). In this week's podcast Robert Bluman talks to Preslav Le. Preslav has been a software engineer at Dropbox for the past three years, contributing to various aspects of Dropbox’s infrastructure including traffic, performance and storage. He was part of the core oncall and storage oncall rotations, dealing with high emergency real world issues, from bad code pushes to complete datacenter outages. Why listen to this podcast: - Dropbox migrated away from Amazon S3 to their own data centres to allow them to optimise for their specific use case. - They are experimenting with Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) drives for primary storage to increase storage density. All writes go to an SSD cache and then get pushed asynchronously to the SMR disk. - Their average block size is 1.6MB with a maximum block size of 4MB. Knowing this allows the team to tune their storage system. - Three languages a