Dropbox Officially Moves Away From AWS

Dropbox is intent on going the opposite direction. While many Internet based companies like Netflix continue to rely on AWS, the cloud storage giant has other plans.

The company has dropped Amazon Web Services, announcing major network expansion in the process.

Dropbox made official the decision to move away from AWS last year, and it now announced its intention of expanding its global network to improve user experience, increase syncing speed for users, and ultimately, reduce networking costs.

The popular cloud host has expanded its network across 14 cities in 7 countries on 3 continents:

“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).”

All in a bid to overcome the problem of bottlenecks and slowdowns that are present on the increasingly complex Internet, where it is not quite possible to guarantee the speed of a connection due to factors outside the control of a company.

And this is what Dropbox intends to do, with a worldwide private data network that is separate from the public Internet — a goal that it has been working towards since 2015.

The added benefit here, of course, is that Dropbox will also cut networking costs in half, outside North America, that is to say, with the private network being built up from purchases of dark fiber when it becomes available.

Dropbox handles over 500 petabytes of data for its users, and a custom proxy stack is being deployed across all of the US datacenters this week, while Dropbox expects the worldwide rollout to take place over the course of the next several quarters.

A long way to go for the company to complete a worldwide private network that is insulated from the Internet, but this is a risky move that could ultimately pay off.