Terrible pop up on that site. Designed by an a hole.
How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers
151–160 of 202 posts
Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers
#152Stories like this kind of make sense to me. 3 people is very few but I guess they really knew what they are doing. Meanwhile, all these orgs with essentially a CRUD app, with 1,000s of engineers..? That I never understood.
They stayed true to a single product purpose, did not add frivolous features and experiments, and didn't deal with payments/billing, eventually being "rescued" by VC money? You seem to gloss over that AWS also helps them out a lot already here, by being the load balancer entry points and ordering VMs from a api.
Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you own a company and fire someone to cut costs nobody is gonna say anything, of course. It's the sad reality. When you cut the company to 1/3 and keep foreigners because of their visa status, nobody is gonna say anything of course, but that says a lot about you! I do not believe that half the company was just "overstaff". I have been in situations where 1 manager had 1 reporter/reported, but they were single ca…
> When you cut the company to 1/3 and keep foreigners because of their visa status, ... that says a lot about you! That... you care about people regardless if they are foreigners and that you try to help those that would have the most problems if they were let go, especially as these problems are a consequence of your hiring of them? I'm not familiar with the story, but from the way you presented it it sounds like a…
Or… heart me out, maybe it’s because Elon knows they have the most to loose and are thus more likely to do whatever he wants to not get kicked out of the country.
Elon made some statements that made his disdain for the “laptop class” quite clear. He is no saint, or genius. He’s mostly just an extremely ruthless smart man.
Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not a bug. If you're not logged in or your account looks like a bot, you can't see comments
> your account looks like a bot That's not a bot if you are not a bot? I know it's 'normal', but I still it as a bug. AI classifying me as something I not is a bug.
Depends on the account. Eg if you look at unfiltered YouTube comments on youtube studio, you'll find many humans that behave like bots and post link to their videos in unrelated discussions
Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not a bug. If you're not logged in or your account looks like a bot, you can't see comments
> your account looks like a bot That's not a bot if you are not a bot? I know it's 'normal', but I still it as a bug. AI classifying me as something I not is a bug.
That’s exactly what a bot would say.
Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers
#156Interesting 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 !
Instagram engineers found some remarkable simple solutions to some hard problems. It's not easy to come up with these solutions. Designing the IDs for example is no small feat, but since this is now common knowledge it's probably not too hard to build a similar system. To get traction from users is the real challenge.
Yeah, we took some of their ideas about ID design and have applied it in a way that we could improve our storage.
Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also need to respond to customer requirements, which IG never needed to do while they had no actual customers. And as soon as fun was up and IG had actual customers (spoiler alert, advertisers) what a surprise 3 devs was not enough. They also need to quickly respond to downtime, because unlike IG if some of those CRUD apps go down in B2B world you are often losing customers actual money not just ad views
Ad views translate to actual money??
Sure. If you are full on marketer you can say "not see an ad for service" is as bad as "service does not work".
But anyway there was never a period where Instagram had a tiny 3 dev team and handled ads at the same time. 3 devs only worked back when there were no customers, no ads, no profits and no real responsibilities.
Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers
#158Earlier 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?
There are some reasons it may lead to resiliency; another teams features slow dB queries not being on your db, teams not mutating data in a shared db, memory leaks in someone elses feature not taking your app down. Being able to choose language/libraries and tune the runtime to your requirements.
Of course when you replace function calls with network calls, make everything asynchronous and eventually consistent, there is a lot of work to do to not end up with a less reliable system.
Re: How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers
#159I 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…
There is not way in hell, I will be able to work for such company more then 6 month (well may be it if it is 7 figures, but even then I don't think I last longer then one year), I am sorry who has to go through this.