Rather, 'they see it as a core enabler of their evolving ambitions to move past being an interesting file-synchronization system to a collaboration platform ready to compete with Google and Microsoft in both the consumer and enterprise arenas.'

While Netflix has gone 'all-in' with Amazon Web Services, Dropbox seems to believe that infrastructure isn't a utility or a commodity, he said. 'It seems that Dropbox feels that its arrow's pointed in that direction and it can't be constrained by someone else's infrastructure.'

'The upstart cloud companies that have built their own global-scale infrastructure are Amazon, Facebook and Google - companies that deal with billions of transactions and millions of users,' Keitt said. The bigger implications are strategic ones.

Keitt, a senior analyst with Forrester Research. 'Their files will sync with the same reliability as before across all of their devices, and as Dropbox adds more users, that performance standard should hold,' said T.J. Later this year, it plans to expand its relationship with AWS to store data in Germany for European business customers.įor the most part, users shouldn't notice anything different as a result of the shift. 'It was clear to us from the beginning that we’d have to build everything from scratch, since there’s nothing in the open source community that’s proven to work reliably at our scale.'ĭropbox will continue to partner with Amazon when warranted, particularly globally. 'We knew we’d be building one of only a handful of exabyte-scale storage systems in the world,' the company said. Performance and the need for customization were key motivators for the move. By October, it had hit its goal of serving 90 percent of its data from its in-house infrastructure. Growth prompted Dropbox to start building its own storage system back in 2013, leading to an initial launch in early 2015.

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