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Cowling

SE Radio 285: James Cowling on Dropbox’s Distributed Storage System

Venue: Dropbox headquarters, San Francisco
James Cowling of Dropbox (architect of their distributed storage system), speaks to Robert Blumen about their move from Amazon’s S3 to their own infrastructure; The show covers: the size, scope and scale of Dropbox’s data management; their experience on Amazon’s S3; why S3 over time did not meet their needs; how the decision was made to build their own; the architecture of Magic Pocket; building the skill sets they needed but did not have at the time; are layer violations ever a good thing?; his team’s “zero errors” policy; the important of invariants; how devops (sre) made the move easier; how they migrated; a brief excursion into the hardware side; what can engineers learn from this migration that will apply to other migrations (even smaller ones)?


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3 comments
  • THis episode skips quite a lot. The distortion in the sound is periodic, rhythmic, ( if that helps work out the problem ) every few seconds or so.

    it was bad enough to stop me listening a few minutes in.

    I hope it gets fixed. I love the show and tune in all the time to pick up advice, tips on contemporary challenges and to hear about emerging concepts. Keep up the great and valuable work.

    Damian

  • Good episode. The article on WIRED is also a good read.

    There are some sound glitches in the beginning, but more than 90% are good quality.

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