Summary of Dropbox/Google Drive Design Deep Dive with Google SWE! | Systems Design Interview Question 3

00:00:00 - 00:25:00

This video discusses the design of Dropbox and Google Drive from a Google SWE perspective. The main points covered are the differences between the two systems, the importance of data locality, and the use of log-based message queues to improve performance and fault tolerance.

• 00:00:00 In this video, Google SWE discusses how Dropbox and Google Drive work on an end-to-end scale. They discuss how users can share files and access them from multiple devices, and how files are automatically saved and replicated to other devices. They mention that the file size limit for Dropbox is 1 GB, and for Google Drive it is 500 GB. They also note that, because Dropbox is a right-based system, it can handle an immense amount of data. Finally, they mention that, because of the high demand for Dropbox and Google Drive, these services will likely need to be supplemented by another provider, such as Amazon.
• 00:05:00 Dropbox and Google Drive both store a lot of data, but they have different ways of handling metadata and transactions. Dropbox uses a relational SQL database, while Google Drive uses a NoSQL database.
• 00:10:00 In this video, Google SWE discusses how to design a Dropbox/Google Drive system with a client. He points out that there are unnecessary components and explains how they can be simplified. He also discusses the importance of data locality and how it can be achieved by splitting files into small chunks.
• 00:15:00 In this video, Google SWE discusses how Dropbox and Google Drive design can be simplified by first uploading the files to S3 and then communicating with the metadata server to determine if the latest version of the file is available. Additionally, he suggests that changes to a document should be handled in a similar manner to how tweets are sent- as a bulk notification to all followers.
• 00:20:00 In this video, Google SWE Systems Design discusses the design of a Dropbox-style file system for a system that allows multiple users to make changes to files. The system is designed to handle conflicts gracefully by either storing both the old and new versions of the file, or by using a metadata cache to speed up reads for commonly-accessed files.
• 00:25:00 In this video, Google SWE discusses the design of Dropbox and Google Drive, comparing and contrasting their approaches. He recommends using log-based message queues to improve server performance and fault tolerance.