Dropbox Syncs 1000 Developers with Coder
About 1000 developers build Dropbox’s capabilities for flexible, reliable, secure file syncing and storage. Dropbox gained its fame as one of the biggest providers for cloud file management on the planet, helping 700 million users share and store files in the consumer, professional, and enterprise markets. Matt Kulka is an Infrastructure Software Engineer at Dropbox. In the past he’s helped big companies like Facebook and PayPal with operations, devops, and software engineering. He and the five other members of the Dropbox Developer Environments team are responsible for providing and managing the developer infrastructure. We talked to Matt about the challenges of keeping 1000 developers productive and happy.
Matt’s team provides developer environments as VMs running in AWS EC2. Each developer gets their own EC2 instance. They use GitHub for version control. For IDEs, most developers use JetBrains or Visual Studio Code.
The environments come in 2 major flavors: One for Linux, the other for Windows. While both run on AWS EC2 they each use different AMIs and other configurations. From there, the engineers can customize their environments. Matt described the 4 major kinds of environments that Dropbox developers work with:
