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How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

engineercodex.substack.com

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Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

#31

Post by Sparkyte »

weird-eye-issue wrote: post #20
Sparkyte wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this idea hurts the industry. Don't get me wrong. I think it is important to hire the right people, but if you don't hire enough people this 3 man job is 80-100 hours a week per for months to years. Look how X has diminished in quality as Elon started slashing team sizes. Then when you design more features, security and other various systems to serve the customers it will creep in complexity. You can not esca…

> Look how X has diminished in quality as Elon started slashing team sizes. what happened?

Back when he acquired twitter he fire 2/3rds the company.

Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

#32

Post by jalk »

0wis wrote: post #8

Interesting I wonder if its seems easy because it’s explained simply or if it really is simple to put in place. I want to make a clone now, just to try. At least for this inspiration, this article was well worth the read. Thanks !

It looks fairly standard tbh. A lot of the heavy lifting is done by AWS. They likely didn’t start out with this exact architecture in mind, but adapted along the way. I.e. something like: The timestamped key format improved poor performance. Redis was introduced when Postgres was getting swamped. Didn’t replace the existing memcached with Redis as it worked as it should. And ofc there surely were a ton of oddities/ issues with their AWS setup that they spent time fixing. The nginx description is a bit vague, but could be some “hack” to work around some ELB scaling behavior that wasn’t to their liking.

Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

#33

Post by Sparkyte »

Aeolun wrote: post #24
Sparkyte wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You talk as if monolithic apps are vastly superior. To be forward it depends entirely on the purpose and life of the application. It is about whatever shoe fits the design.

Sure. It’s just that 99% of applications work fine (or better) as a monolithic design.

Depends on the purpose of the application though. Monolithic is a good architecture when you have a few purposeful features and functions.

But when your design relies on many services to provide a wide variety of features you need to break out this design to allow teams to operate independently.

Mini monoliths are more popular today than traditional monoliths of the old.

Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

#34

Post by falcor84 »

Sparkyte wrote: post #31
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look how X has diminished in quality as Elon started slashing team sizes. what happened?

Back when he acquired twitter he fire 2/3rds the company.

I think the interesting "what happened" is about the consequences - has there been some objective drop in uptime/performance/errors or some other technical metric?

Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

#36

Post by drno123 »

Sparkyte wrote: post #31
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look how X has diminished in quality as Elon started slashing team sizes. what happened?

Back when he acquired twitter he fire 2/3rds the company.

No, what is the consequence, how has quality of Twitter diminished? As a “normal” user I can not observe any degradation of Twitter service.

Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

#37

Post by Sparkyte »

Sparkyte wrote: post #31
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look how X has diminished in quality as Elon started slashing team sizes. what happened?

Back when he acquired twitter he fire 2/3rds the company.

@falcor84

We hit maximum reply lengths but yes there has been. And a massive security breach.

Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

#38

Post by Sparkyte »

falcor84 wrote: post #34
Sparkyte wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when he acquired twitter he fire 2/3rds the company.

I think the interesting "what happened" is about the consequences - has there been some objective drop in uptime/performance/errors or some other technical metric?

Yes actually.

And one massive security breach.

Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

#39

Post by surfingdino »

_xivi wrote: post #7

> we can assume that Instagram was written using Objective-C and a combination of other things like UIKit. How can they know the internal infrastructure but have to assume the app language? Edit: So the entire piece is taken almost verbatim as-is from a couple old articles on instagram engineering blog. It might as well just redirect to: https://instagram-engineering.com/what-powers-instagram-hund... This is against…

Looks like someone may have been using ChatGPT to produce that post.

Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

#40

Post by Sparkyte »

drno123 wrote: post #36
Sparkyte wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when he acquired twitter he fire 2/3rds the company.

No, what is the consequence, how has quality of Twitter diminished? As a “normal” user I can not observe any degradation of Twitter service.

Sure, but I feel like this was because of feature creep more than anything else.

Most common thing people use it for is posting and reading. If you fake feeds as if they are real-time then the viewer will never know there was a system outage.

I am almost positive there was a massive security breach too.

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