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With two data center regions (one on each coast) storing all our user data, and five network PoPs in major cities across the country where we saw the most traffic.
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Going back to 2014, our network presence was only in the US. Some users have seen and have increased sync speeds by as much as 300 percent, and performance has improved across the board. We evaluated some more standard offerings (CDNs and other “cloud” products) but for our specific needs this custom solution was best. The edge proxy is a stack of servers that act as the first gateway for TLS & TCP handshake for users and is deployed in PoPs (points of presence) to improve the performance for a user accessing Dropbox from any part of the globe.
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We also designed a custom-built edge-proxy architecture into our network.
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In doing so, we’ve added hundreds of gigabits of Internet connectivity with transit providers (regional and global ISPs), and hundreds of new peering partners (where we exchange traffic directly rather than through an ISP). To do that, we’ve built a network across 14 cities in seven countries on three continents. As our data centers grew, the rest of our network also expanded to serve our users - more than 500 million around the globe - at light-speed with a consistent level of reliability, whether they were in San Francisco or Singapore. Since launching Magic Pocket last year, we’ve been storing and serving more than 90 percent of our users’ data on our own custom-built infrastructure, which has helped us to be more efficient and improved performance for our users globally.īut with about 75 percent of our users located outside of the United States, moving onto our own custom-built data center was just the first step in realizing these benefits. Update (November 14, 2017): Miami, Sydney, Paris, Milan and Madrid have been added to the Dropbox Edge Network.
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