Dropbox plans to expand its network to improve speed and cut costs

Following its decision to no longer use Amazon Web Services (AWS) last year, Dropbox just announced that it would be expanding its global network in an effort to cut costs and increase the syncing speed for its users.

The company intends to move to the edge of the network with the aim of providing services as close to its users as possible. Dropbox began this endeavor by expanding its network across 14 cities in seven countries on three continents.

Raghav Bhargava, a network engineer at Dropbox, provided further details on the company's expansion efforts in a blog post on its site, saying:

"We’ve built a network across 14 cities in seven countries on three continents. 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)."

In order to power its expanded network, the company decided to build its own custom proxy based on open source software that would also improve the performance for users accessing its services outside of the US.

Dropbox's custom proxy stack will be deployed across all of its US data centers starting from today and the worldwide rollout will take place over the course of the next several quarters. Sydney will receive the update next followed by Paris in Q3 and Madrid and Milan in Q4 of this year. Dropbox will have a total of 25 facilities in ten countries across four continents by the end of 2017.

The expansion will ultimately serve two goals: it will improve user experience worldwide and it will help Dropbox cut networking costs in half according to the company.

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