Scalabilty for Dropbox System Design

• Horizontal Scaling
  • We can add more servers behind the load balancer to increase the capacity of each service. This is known as Horizontal Scaling and each service can be independently scaled horizontally in our design.
• Database Sharding
  • Metadata DB is sharded based on object_id. Our hash function will map each object_id to a random server where we can store the file/folder metadata. To query for a particular object_id, service can determine the database server using same hash function and query for data. This approach will distribute our database load to multiple servers making it scalable.
• Cache Sharding
  • Similar to Metadata DB Sharding, we are distributing the cache to multiple servers. In-fact Redis has out of box support for partitioning the data across multiple Redis instances. Usage of Consistent Hashing for distributing data across instances ensures that load is equally distributed if one instance goes away.

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