Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember when Instagram had to shard their database to keep up with demand, and the article was so popular among developers. "Check it out, they split up the databases! Whoa!" I'm not trying to dismiss their work, but it was a relatively ordinary engineering feat.
We (at IG) aren't claiming to be doing revolutionary things on infrastructure--but one thing I found super valuable when scaling Instagram in the early days was having access to stories from other companies on how they've scaled. That's the spirit in which I encourage our engineers to blog about our DB scaling, our search infra, etc--I think the more open we are (as a company, but more broadly as an industry) about t…
Thank you for sharing this information. Keep it up and yes, the better off we'll all be with more articles like this from large scale companies.