The Instagram Architecture Facebook Bought for a Cool Billion Dollars
Instagram uses a pastiche of different technologies and strategies. The team is small yet has experience rapid growth riding the crest of a rising social and mobile wave, it uses a hybrid of SQL and NoSQL, it uses a ton of open source projects, they chose the cloud over colo, Amazon services are highly leveraged rather than building their own, reliability is through availability zones, async work scheduling links components together, the system is composed as much as possible of services exposing an API and external services they don’t have to build, data is stored in-memory and in the cloud, most code is in a dynamic language, custom bits have been coded to link everything together, and they have gone fast and kept small.
Although I presume the millions of users are what Facebook really paid for.
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But the millions of users either have a Facebook account already, or don't want one.
If Instagram becomes lame, they'll jump ship instantly. If Instagram stays the same, there was no point to any of this.
