Instagram - Scaling a Startup

If you keep up with news on the ‘net, you may have heard about photo sharing startup Instagram, which was purchased by Facebook for $1 Billion just 9 days after they released their Android app. Well, not only are they based mostly on open source software (well, yeah, pretty much a given for web startups these days), but they’ve dealt with scaling issues like a million new users in 12 hours, and they’re talking about it. There’s the slide deck to a talk that co-founder Mike Krieger gave on TechCrunch and Scribd, along with a High Scalability article about it, and an earlier High Scalability article that gives an overview of the company and some details of what and how they’re running. Instagram Engineering also has a tumblr account, with a bunch of cool posts like Keeping Instagram up with over a million new users in twelve hours (which specifically mentions statsd, dogslow, PGFouine, node2dm and some database stuff) and What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens of Technologies which talks about their OS and hosting (Ubuntu 11.04 on EC2), load balancing (nginx, DNS and Amazon Elastic Load Balancer), Django, Redis, Solr, Munin, etc.

This is a really cool company, doing some really cool stuff, at a really large scale, and growing fast.

On another note, I’m continuing my attempt to read all of the excellent Puppet articles on Brice Figureau’s (aka masterzen) blog. It’s taking a while, as it’s really good, in-depth information that I want to rememeber, but I’d highly recommend it for anyone working with Puppet.