Fourteen years ago, Dropbox took its first steps toward building its own hardware infrastructure—and as our product and user base has grown, so has our infrastructure. What started with just a handful of servers has evolved into one of the largest custom-built storage systems in the world. We've scaled from a few dozen machines to tens of thousands of servers with millions of drives.

That evolution didn’t happen by accident. It took years of iteration, close collaboration with suppliers, and a product-first mindset that treated infrastructure as a strategic advantage. Now we’re excited to share what’s next: the launch of our seventh-generation hardware platform, now featuring Crush, Dexter, and Sonic for our traditional compute, database, and storage workloads, and our newest GPU tiers, Gumby and Godzilla. To make this leap possible, we dramatically increased storage bandwidth, effectively doubled our available rack power, and introduced a next-gen storage chassis designed to even further minimize vibration and heat.

This generation represents our most efficient, capable, and scalable architecture yet—and it’ll help us as we continue to build and scale helpful AI products like Dropbox Dash. Below, we’ll walk you through how we designed the latest version of our server hardware as well as key lessons we’ll carry into generations to come.

The Infrastructure team at Hugging Face is excited to share a behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of Hugging Face's production infrastructure, which we’ve had the privilege of helping to build and maintain. Our team's dedication to designing and implementing a robust monitoring and alerting system has been instrumental in ensuring the stability and scalability of our platforms. We’re constantly reminded of the impact that our alerts have on our ability to identify and respond to potential issues before they become major incidents.

In this blog post, we’ll dive into the details of three mighty alerts that play their unique role in supporting our production infrastructure, and explore how they've helped us maintain the high level of performance and uptime that our community relies on.

RustFS is a high-performance distributed object storage software built using Rust, one of the most popular languages worldwide. Along with MinIO, it shares a range of advantages such as simplicity, S3 compatibility, open-source nature, support for data lakes, AI, and big data. Furthermore, it has a better and more user-friendly open-source license in comparison to other storage systems, being constructed under the Apache license. As Rust serves as its foundation, RustFS provides faster speed and safer distributed features for high-performance object storage.

With Yoke, you write your infrastructure definitions in Go or Rust, compile it to WebAssembly, and then you take input and output Kubernetes manifests that get applied to the cluster.

Insights and best practices from a real-world rollback gameday

At Freshworks, we regularly perform blue-green migrations to upgrade our EKS clusters and implement Redis-related changes with minimal disruption. In this article, we’ll walk through how we migrate approximately 900 Redis endpoints — spanning one staging region and five production regions, each with 4–5 EKS clusters — while ensuring high availability for our stateful Redis workloads.

Our mission was clear: complete the migration with minimal disruption to our services while ensuring data consistency. Here’s how we tackled this complex engineering challenge and achieved near-zero downtime migrations at scale.

External Secrets is the de-facto choice for secrets management in Kubernetes clusters. It simplifies the task of the administrator(s) of the cluster, ensuring only the secrets that are explicitly defined are present and accessible.

It comes with many great features but most important than all is its integration with major cloud providers.

In this blog post you will learn how to deploy it without hard-coded credentials and using only the power of OpenID Connect for trust relationship between services.

Super quick one I want to document here! I got myself on a side quest, again! No biggie, my ZSH shell was taking ages to load. When I say ages, more like 5+ seconds every time I opened a new terminal, that sort of thing can add up. This is just something I’ve lived with over the years, nothing has prompted this other than me wondering why it’s slow, then searching for how to profile it.

In today's workplace, communication tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams are essential for staying connected at work. However, as orchestration and automation needs increase, so does the volume of notifications flooding these channels. What’s meant to streamline work can quickly become overwhelming. We call it "ChatOps fatigue" - when teams get so many alerts, they start tuning them out.

Modern Kubernetes deployment methodologies have grown increasingly complex, layering abstraction upon abstraction in pursuit of flexibility. This article challenges that trajectory by examining how fundamental Unix tools combined with Makefiles can provide a more transparent and maintainable alternative to popular solutions like Helm and Kustomize.

Freelens is a free and open-source user interface designed for managing Kubernetes clusters. It provides a standalone application compatible with macOS, Windows, and Linux operating systems, making it accessible to a wide range of users. The application aims to simplify the complexities of Kubernetes management by offering an intuitive and user-friendly interface.