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Forum Discussion

Akhil_M_S's avatar
Akhil_M_S
Explorer | Level 3
6 years ago

Architecture pattern used by Dropbox

As we have many software architecture patterns available like peer-to-peer, client server, Observer and a lot more, which one does Dropbox uses ? and why it has selected that specific architecture? P...
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  • Jane's avatar
    Jane
    6 years ago

    Hey Akhil_M_S, I'd happily take it from where you left off with Daphne; I hope my message finds you well today!

    To answer your initial question Akhil, different features on different platforms tend to have slightly different models, but the most common pattern is the observer pattern. This is implemented as long-polling from the client to the server, which holds the canonical representation of the data. For example, we do this for a lot of sync features, but also for comments/file activity. Where we don't use long-polling, we do client/server polling.

    Hope that helps with your class presentation and good luck with your project! 

Walter's avatar
Walter
Icon for Dropbox Staff rankDropbox Staff

Hi again Prasanth! I'm fine as well; thanks for asking. 

I'm glad to hear the information I provided helps and should you come up with any additional Dropbox questions, please feel free to let us know.

Until we speak again, have a wonderful weekend prasanthkp! 

prasanthkp's avatar
prasanthkp
Explorer | Level 4
5 years ago

Hi Walter,

Hope you are doing great.

I went through the security whitepaper. Thanks for sending this. It had lots of information. I would like to understand more about how you shard the MySQL db.  As you mentioned below in the previous post.

"And (2) File metadata is stored in a MySQL-backed database service, and is sharded and replicated as needed to meet performance and high availability requirements."

I assume you use hash partitioning.

  • How is sharding done?
  • How edgestore routes to the correct "shard"?
  • How is it replicated across different DC?
  • Also is it still benefical to go with MySQL than a NoSQL db?
  • Is there a detailed paper or blog around the sharding alone?

Thanks in advance.

Prasanth

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