Apache Kafka is a popular solution for distributed streaming and queuing for large amounts of data. It is widely adopted in the technology industry, and Dropbox is no exception. Kafka plays an important role in the data fabric of many of our critical distributed systems: data analytics, machine learning, monitoring, search, and stream processing (Cape), to name a few.
In this post we will describe the Edge network part of Dropbox traffic infrastructure. This is an extended transcript of our NginxConf 2018 presentation. Around the same time last year we described low-level aspects of our infra in the Optimizing web servers for high throughput and low latency post. This time we’ll cover higher-level things like our points of presence around the world, GSLB, RUM DNS, L4 loadbalancers, nginx setup and its dynamic configuration, and a bit of gRPC proxying.
Dropbox has more than half a billion registered users who trust us with over an exabyte of data and petabytes of corresponding metadata.
The core Dropbox web application is 10 years old and used by millions of users per day. Hundreds of front-end engineers across multiple cities actively work on it. Unsurprisingly, our codebase is very large and somewhat irregular. Recently written parts have thorough test coverage, other parts haven’t been updated in years.
Over the past two years we’ve worked to modernize our front-end stack. We’ve successfully moved from CoffeeScript to TypeScript, from jQuery to React, and from a custom Flux implementation to Redux. Having completed these migrations we identified our utility library, Underscore, as one more candidate for migration.