Instagram Stack

Instagram Engineering: “We thought it would be fun to give a sense of all the systems that power Instagram, at a high-level; you can look forward to more in-depth descriptions of some of these systems in the future. This is how our system has evolved in the just-over-1-year that weâ€ ve been live, and while there are parts weâ€ re always re-working, this is a glimpse of how a startup with a small engineering team can scale to our 14 million+ users in a little over a year.”

Go read this post, if you haven’t already. It’s amazing how much the company has changed in just a little over a year.

I wonder how long it’s going to take to transition all this content to Facebook servers? Will they even attempt to do it? The integration of the systems will be fun to watch. From a DevOps perspective it’ll be a great challenge. Hopefully Facebook will leave most of the stack alone and move the parts that can be moved fairly easily. I figure the actual storage of photos is one area that could come over fairly easily. Facebook has some caching mechanisms that could work right away, but all-in-all I think I’d leave most of the Instagram infrastructure in place. Why? Because it’s working.

Their new infrastructure sure beats where they were on October 6, 2010.

“On Wednesday, October 6, 2010, Instagram launched its mobile photo sharing service for iPhone. In six hours, the back-end operation, which was running off a single machine in Los Angeles, was completely overwhelmed.”

That’s right, all of Instagram was hosted on one computer. Amazing.