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What’s new with Robinhood, our in-house load balancing service

Dropbox load balancing service we deployed in 2020. It is responsible for routing all our internal traffic between servers to balance service load.

As shown in the illustration above, a Robinhood instance is deployed to each of our data centers and consists of three parts: the load balancing service, a proxy, and routing database. By prioritizing simplicity, minimizing client changes, and planning for migration from the outset, we were able to streamline the LBS's development and deployment, and avoid costly pitfalls. The PID controller algorithm at its core has yielded promising results—showcasing significant performance improvements in our largest services—and we’ve gained valuable insights into the design and operation of load balancing services at Dropbox-scale.

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