I presume this architecture would look very different today? With supabase, spanner, cloudflare, etc? When scaling, the database bit is the least clear to me. How do you create an "isolated" database per customer?
How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers
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Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers
#5214 million doing not so complex things is an easy achievement. When you get into a lot of microservices providing tons of features your teams will balloon.
That's why it's important to keep the number of devs low, it makes it less likely that one starts talking about microservices.
We use the microservices architecture as a single team and don’t have any issues with this for many years. The key is to have a monorepo and stay consistent by following strict coding guidelines.
In my opinion it makes the backend way more resilient than a monolith.
Don’t kill me for this opinion please ;)
Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers
#53> 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…
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Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers
#54> 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…
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Not OP. No anger in his words. Please don't make OP feel inadequate for expressing themselves clearly.
Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers
#55> 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…
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Unless you're a mind reader you are way out of line with this comment.
Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers
#56> 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…
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Looks like those wordpress bots have finally figured out HN as well.
Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers
#57I presume this architecture would look very different today? With supabase, spanner, cloudflare, etc? When scaling, the database bit is the least clear to me. How do you create an "isolated" database per customer?
I can't find where it says it's per customer. It says they have "a few physical shards". From what I understand, they had a few physical DB servers which stored their own subsets of data. When a request came in, the appropriate DB server was selected based on photo or user ID.
P.S. Here's more information: https://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/10853187575/sh...
Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers
#58Earlier 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. He had a point there though: He said that there seem to be "3 managers 'managing' one engineer", and I believe this is a common problem in the industry. VC-funded startups are terribly overstaffed and over-inflated.
Musk's actions have certainly damaged Twitter and its engineering. When you set the house on fire of course some termites will get killed but then you might also kill some babies and the family dog.
A lot of tech companies have bloat in the form of AI ethics people, DEI people and so on. They need to go. But Musk probably hurt twitter a lot in short term by firing a lot of engineers and making it a place that made people unhappy.
Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers
#59Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You can split things up you don't have to though. Teams operating independently is fairly orthogonal to this.