Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers

engineercodex.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 202 posts

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

#111

Post by djtango »

rapnie wrote: post #107

Here's recent insiders experience on developing Meta's Threads app on top of Instagram infra: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/building-metas-th... > In July of this year, Meta launched its latest mobile app, Threads, a microblogging service and new rival to X, formerly Twitter. In the first five days following its launch, the app achieved 100M downloads – a new record for the company by some margin. Meta’s…

I tthink the reality of modern development, especially one plugged into the Meta ecosystem is that there is probably a tonne of integration work to be done.

- monetization

- finance

- analytics

- ad placement

- ad bidding

- android client

- apple client

- browser client

Just off the top of my head in 2 mins that's a few of the extra concerns I can come up with...

I remember meeting someone who was responsible for writing an ultra performant JS WhatsApp client for firefox OS. When you have 2B users, the long tail is long...

OG Instagram was pre-monetisation. So yeah maybe a simple image hosting service needs fewer engineers but maybe a profitable business that can monetise the service needs more...

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

#112

Post by lijok »

Octabrain wrote: post #81

I find the simplicity of the stack brilliant. It makes me to think now, to which extent, the industry nowadays simply suffers from a mix of lack of knowledge, CV driving design and big players in the game trying to sell you overkilling solutions and approaches for their own economical benefit. Have we perhaps, fell into a big enchant and, at the end of the day, 99% of companies out there could just use a classic LAMP…

Give me a cpu, some memory and an S3 bucket, and I'll build you (almost) anything you want.

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

#113

Post by thruflo »

0xFF0123 wrote: post #100
engineercodex wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. Comments like this make my day, so thank you! I’m trying to find old software engineering gems and explain them as simply as possible, so I’m glad you found it simple to understand. Also, it’s definitely possible to make a clone, but the hard part is getting the users :)

Do you have a link to Fabric? My Google Fu is failing me, looks like it might be dead?

https://www.fabfile.org

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

#114

Post by ahoka »

BoorishBears wrote: post #82
sleiben wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

How does it make the backend more resilient than a monolith? Do you not realize you have multiple instances of a monolith or something?

Bad input crashes app, monolith fails over, other instance crashes. Full outage. Assuming proper vertical separation, this risk can be reduced by microservices.

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

#115

Post by yokoprime »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #35
luismedel wrote: post #10

I have chills thinking about the oncall schedule of these 3 colleagues...

What on-call? Was there even anything needing 24h support back then?

Beauty of a free app with no advertisers is there's no SLA's.

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

#116

Post by stock_toaster »

ahoka wrote: post #109
Octabrain wrote: post #81

I find the simplicity of the stack brilliant. It makes me to think now, to which extent, the industry nowadays simply suffers from a mix of lack of knowledge, CV driving design and big players in the game trying to sell you overkilling solutions and approaches for their own economical benefit. Have we perhaps, fell into a big enchant and, at the end of the day, 99% of companies out there could just use a classic LAMP…

I just imagined trying to sell this architecture for a new product in an imaginary company, an amalgamation of every place I have ever worked: You have to change to Azure, because we are Microsoft partners and we have free credit. The credit is not too much though and we have to spend the same money on useless trainings so we keep being partners. 4 core and 8GB should be plenty for your dev VMs, that’s the largest we…

> What did I miss?

The security team is getting weird reports from their internal nmap scanner that is constantly scanning this network. No, they don't know which of their vendor automated scanners are doing it, no they can't turn it off, so please add code to specifically ignore those scans.

Our VMware cluster has plenty of compute left, but it is out of storage space because there are hundreds of VMs from other teams and nobody knows what is still being used, so you can't get any more dev instances until we get more storage added to the NAS (in the next quarter's budget).

Any unrelated director somehow ended up seeing this diagram and had some "suggestions". Please implement these changes asap.

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

#118

Post by the-smug-one »

koonsolo wrote: post #85
Sparkyte wrote: post #2

14 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.

Honest question: what justifies microservices in the popular companies compared to instagram? Twitter: just sharing a bunch of text. Netflix: platform with static content, where sharing isn't even possible. TikToķ: Instagram for video, so basically just bigger files. WhatsApp: they also pulled it off with a small team. If you talk about Roblox, now there's a challenge! And they pulled it off with way less engineers t…

For Twitter and TikTok, I bet that the reasons are B2B offerings and not their B2C offerings.

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

#119

Post by seedie »

0xFF0123 wrote: post #100
engineercodex wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. Comments like this make my day, so thank you! I’m trying to find old software engineering gems and explain them as simply as possible, so I’m glad you found it simple to understand. Also, it’s definitely possible to make a clone, but the hard part is getting the users :)

Do you have a link to Fabric? My Google Fu is failing me, looks like it might be dead?

I was wrong thruflo pasted the correct link

You are probably right. The Instagram Engineering blog [0] points to the Fabric documentation on Read the Docs [1] which is empty.

"Read the docs" links to the GitHub repo [2] but it's 404 and even the GitHub organization zwsyff888 is gone.

[0] https://instagram-engineering.com/what-powers-instagram-hund...

[1] https://fabric.readthedocs.io

[2] https://github.com/zwsyff888/fabric

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

#120

Post by teakie »

Sparkyte wrote: post #13
kristopolous wrote: post #4

"When you choose the right people you'll need only a few. When you don't, you'll need them all"

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…

this is what work is.

efficiency shrinks by more team also you get other people. if you are working on something you stay alive until it's done.

≠ a job

Post reply on HN