Dropbox announced today that it has moved more than 90 percent of its users' data to the company's new custom-built infrastructure, putting it in a position to potentially challenge the supremacy of other cloud computing services like Amazon and Google.
Over the last two and a half years, Dropbox's team of engineers built a vast computer network and dedicated server structure for its roughly 500 million users. Dubbing the project Magic Pocket, the company's aim in undertaking such a monumental task was to move it away from relying on Amazon Web Services to store users' data.
Metadata has always been stored on Dropbox's servers, but the files themselves - the ones that users drag onto the little blue folder on their desktops - have been stored elsewhere.
In the first of a purported series of blog posts, Dropbox explained that it has grown enormously since launching in 2008, reaching 500 million users and 500 petabytes of user data, and that such growth has required new methods for storing data. Since launching the project, the company has been slowly transferring data to proprietary hardware and software, a process which they argue has allowed them to increase performance and safety.
"We knew we'd be building one of only a handful of exabyte-scale storage systems in the world," said Akhil Gupta, Dropbox's vice president of Infrastructure. "It was clear to us from the beginning that we'd have to build everything from scratch, since there's nothing in the open source community that's proven to work reliably at our scale."
Dropbox's recent innovations are likely to encourage other companies to develop their own cloud computing infrastructures, and it highlights how the innovations in this field are rapidly transforming the way companies operate online. Reports indicate that by 2020, cloud computing could become a $191 billion industry.
Currently, Dropbox's reported $10 billion valuation has made it a target for pundits and investors who said the company doesn't have the financial clout and market dominance that it claims. Whether Dropbox maintains this valuation and successfully maneuvers itself into a leading position in the competitive new cloud computing industry, in which businesses place value on the ability to store and share data without the expense of a dedicated hardware system, remains to be seen.
