Will You Crash When You Grow?

Dropbox grew from 2,000 to more than 40,000,000 users in three years. To most of its customers, the service is just a convenient way to save and retrieve their digital “stuff” in a virtual “cloud. ”

They don’t know how much time and effort goes into making sure it works. They don’t care.  As long as it works. Which it does.

But from the perspective of a startup which suddenly explodes, handling that much growth without crashing (with an IT staff of 1 to 3 people) is a small miracle.  This is especially true considering that their entire business depends upon a robust, smooth-operating IT infrastructure and bulletproof software – all of which had to be expanded at an absolutely blistering pace. Dropbox’s approach to planning and growing its IT infrastructure contains important lessons for any business contemplating IT expansion or technology changes of any kind.

Rajiv Eranki, Dropbox’s head of server engineering at the time, outlined several decisions the company made to allow it to scale (I first noticed the post thanks to Mashable):

– Choose reliability. Eranki lists the tech tools his team went with and says: “The reason why we chose each of these things was the same — reliability. ”  He says he went with “pretty standard” stuff.  Too often, credit unions can be lured by sexy new features, or by very new technology that’s unproven from a reliability, security or interoperability standpoint.  These issues can cause failures – and/or cost a fortune to upgrade or replace in a few years.

– Keep IT consistent. It might be tempting for a credit union planning a tech upgrade to look at cost first when it comes to hardware or software products. But Eranki’s approach was to choose consistency: “Rather than relying on a bunch of different server configurations and hardware types, the team had smaller categories of machine types with consistent configurations.”

Keeping to a well-defined long-term plan, and steering away from ending up with a hodge-podge of products can yield major benefits over the long-term.

– Keep things simple. Rather than deal with additional complexities, Eranki’s team spent a little more to keep their infrastructure looking pretty much the same across their entire operation.  “It might cost a little extra … but I think it’s worth it for the simplicity. ” This approach enabled a small team to handle more growth, more outside challenges and better adapt to a quickly shifting situation.  If a change was required, they had fewer variables to consider.

When viewed as a whole, the choices Eranki and the Dropbox team made were victories of planning.  Their story illustrates the importance of considering future growth and expansion plans as part of the IT strategy.  Aside from a very interesting read for IT professionals, Eranki’s blog post should remind us that IT can become complex – and can fail – unless it is given the same level of thought and consideration as we give to planning our next branch or introducing a new loan product.  IT infrastructure and software development planning is every bit as important to the long-term success of any business.