Dropbox System design

Manish Sonal
4 min readJun 14, 2020

If you are preparing for system design interview, this article would give you a very quick understanding of how Dropbox backend was designed and how it gradually evolved.

An important part of system design is how efficiently you can recognize the scope of improvements as requirement changes, that’s what you would understand in this article.

The humble beginning of Dropbox backend looked something like the diagram below(first version) in mid 2007*.

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Manish Sonal

Cosultant@Google, Ex Sr. ML Researcher, Ex-Microsoft & still learning !