Dropbox traffic infrastructure: Edge network

Good find, I like this pattern. I could see a niche startup or open source solution providing this as a service, similar to statuspage (acquired by atlassian). It could also help keep the layout consistent, for user familiarity.

If you have trouble to connect to github.com how you're going to "git clone https://github.com/[xxx]"?

pretty cool.

quick question, why not just make

- https://github.debug or

- https://debug.github.com

Is this open-source, how can I make one for my company?

It really depends who your clients are. If they are servers, 30s can work okay. If they are end users, caching happens all over. It's a huge PITA, especially since you'll run into podunk ISPs that have their own custom caching setup, but you have a customer with a shop there. Not that I'm still bitter.

It really depends on the clients, here is an excerpt from the article:

> Here we also need to mention the myriad embedded devices using Dropbox API that range from video cameras to smart fridges which have a tendency of resolving DNS addresses only during power-on.

It would be funny if part of what they are seeing is because the Dropbox client doesn't try reconnects or re-resolving very often.

DNS TTL is a PITA for us at Netflix as well. We use Zuul to proxy cross-region for TTL "non-responders".

There's a lot of caching done by e.g. Comcast that does not always honor the TTL.

Read more on anycast. Anycast lets different computers advertise the same IP address from multiple places. When your computer tries to talk to that IP address (over whatever protocol you chose) the network sends that traffic to the “closest” computer advertising that IP address.

TCP builds a reliable stream on top of unreliable IP packets. Since which computer is “closest” rarely changes, your stream will keep being sent to the same server. When that server stops advertising the IP, then the data will get sent to a different server which will say “I don’t know what you are talking about, Reset your stream” and the tcp connection will close, basically.

Anycast route election is done by the connecting router (typically the clients ISP), and it works over bgp like normal route advertising - it's transparent to your applications and they only get directed to one endpoint destination (typically the one with the lowest latency, congestion, or cost). Once the router gets a request from a client for a destination, it does the same thing it usually does and checks the possible routes and chooses the "best" based on the rules defined by the owner of the router. The difference here is that not all of those proposed routes make it to the same physical destination. There is some stickyness to make sure you're arriving at the same destination for the duration of that connection.

Really it's like asking your favorite maps app where McDonalds is - it'll know to give you results close to you, since it knows there are many McDonalds. It would make sense for you to choose the closest, but it's not enforced by McDonalds. Similarly, if I do the same and we live in different cities, we'll get different results. The end result is that we both got to different physical places by specifying the same thing, and it's up to McDonalds to make sure the menu is the same :)

Are these really two competing definitions or just manifestations of the same concept? What is considered an edge device depends on the boundaries of whatever network is under discussion.

I've never heard it used with that second definition. It's pretty consistently used to refer to running close to the user, as opposed to having a big data center which most of your users aren't near.

The second definition could be a confusion of ownership — i.e. are you paying a CDN to do higher-level service or running the services yourself?

It's the "edge" of what you control as the service provider.

Those aren't completely distinct. We've started calling the edge everything between app servers and user devices. The boundary is "where your users are in control", but the edge itself is pretty fat.

This article is about neither of those things, though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_device is the term that's relevant to this article. It's about the network edge itself.

It's OK, you can call your on-premises machine/IoT "Fog" computing - thank Cisco. :)

I now noticed that if you click from here (i.e. with the refer of news.ycombinator.com), it won't load.

No idea why though.

If I had to guess the people who wrote this are just assuming tls on top.

Dropbox doesn't offer privacy. Anything done on the service is visible to them and whoever else convinces them to hand over the data.

They're exactly the type of cloud service that shouldn't be used by businesses or privacy-conscious individuals.

Security's also questionable. They had an incident where one could log into any account a long time ago. More recently they were presenting a fake admin dialog to syphon the admin password on macOS and perform some admin tasks on the machine.

Ouch, that was embarrassing -- thanks for spotting =) Sorry about that -- ESL and stuff. Editors did a hell of a job fixing our English, but errors still slipped in. We'll be fixing grammar (and probably add link to the presentation PDF) later this week.

Who describes Dropbox as the same as FTP?

This has to be HN at its worst. Reducing a complicated file sharing and collaboration tool to an insecure and highly technical protocol.

Dropbox: I can upload a file super easily and share a simple & secure link with someone who just has a web browser.

FTP: I can upload a file to an FTP server I've either configured on my server or rented online. I'll then provide an FTP url to friend with instructions on how they should login and what FTP client they should use on their chosen device.

EDIT: This could be sarcasm, if I didn't pick up on then feel free to downvote me to hell.

EDIT 2: Thanks to the comments, this is sarcasm. I messed up. Sorry rakoo.

I'm also curious how torrents are used and why.

They dont store customer data at the Edge at all (only network optimizations for data going from user to the data center).

Probably not. You can reset your password without losing your content.

They did, but I imagine it was really expensive vs building their own stuff at that scale. Plus they probably don't want to be reliant on a competitor in many ways.

They were using AWS. They have moved off of it within the last couple years because they now have the scale where it makes financial sense to build their own infrastructure and also to provide a better, faster service. They've had improved read/write + sync speeds since switching over to their own infrastructure. Having those checkboxes in a table showing that you have the fastest cloud storage works really well in B2B, which has been a big focus for them recently.

Early edge network was indeed prototyped in AWS: a simple setup with ELB in tcp mode, nginx and proxy_protocol.

Once we've got all data from that experiment: performance, cost, and flexibility included, we've decided to start building our own PoPs.

"Just" using AWS isn't going to solve any of the problems this article describes.