
The Instagram Architecture Facebook Bought for a Cool Billion Dollars - avsaro
http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/4/9/the-instagram-architecture-facebook-bought-for-a-cool-billio.html
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nickbarnwell
Positing that Facebook purchased Instagram for its architecture strikes me as
odd. They (FB) have solved all of the problems that Instragram faces and more
for a userbase roughly twenty times as large, and while the infrastructure is
interesting for those at companies aspiring to Instagram's success, for your
average systems engineer at Facebook or Google I would think it seems
pedestrian in comparison

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jack-r-abbit
I read that title as kind of tongue in cheek. I'm pretty sure Facebook could
have built the exact same functionality for less money and in less time as it
took to initiate and finalize the acquisition. Winning their users over may
have been harder to do. I guess they just figured it would be easier to just
buy the users. _shrug_

~~~
bigiain
Agreed. Also a pretty topical rebuttal to the other flood of articles claiming
they were bought purely for the users - widely reported as being valued at $37
each, a number arrived at by assuming there's absolutely nothing else of value
in the transaction.

Given the "prices" Google are rumored to be paying to acquire great
engineering staff, a team of three engineers who've got a proven track record
of building and supporting 100million users on their own - surely they'd be
worth some not-down-in-the-noise-floor percentage of even the seemingly insane
valuation here?

And a founding team who've "created" $1billion in value in ~550 days? Even if
you only credit them with last weeks $500mil rumors - surely that founding
team would be worth several tens of million dollars even if you didn't get the
company they founded?

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Retric
They also had ~50 million in the bank after a funding round that was so recent
they could not have spent much of the money. Which means FB got a 5% discount
on that billion dollar price tag and helps to make all those estimates just
that much more reasonable.

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ajslater
Didn't Sequoia make a big YouTube investment suspiciously immediately before
acquisition?

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iusable
3 web ops engineers for 30+ (before android release) million users & 100+ EC2
instances = WOW!

~~~
zerostar07
I love the instagram app and concept and execution, but I wonder why they even
need 100+ EC2 instances (my guess is that almost all of them just serve
photos). It appears instagram has little web traffic and it's not so heavily
loaded with users 24/7 like facebook is.

<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/instagram.com/>

~~~
iusable
What you are seeing there is only the visitor traffic metrics for the landing
page and the URLs shared out. You aren't seeing the back-end API centric
traffic from the app to the core servers.

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zerostar07
Twitter is in a similar situation, and according to compete data (inaccurate i
know but vaguely indicative), twitter has more than 100 times more traffic,
and they had ~70 servers in 2009 (<http://www.quora.com/How-many-servers-does-
Twitter-have>). Just curious here.

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iusable
I completely agree with your take on it; but pls note the entirely different
problem Instagram solved vs. Twitter. If you build a real-time streaming
application for pure text based objects, your stack will look very different.
But collecting, storing, replicating and serving images as your primary social
object != same thing.

Hence, even when Twitter 'added' photos, they went with Photobucket so as to
not change the nature of their stack. It had taken them 3 years to really get
ahead of their adoption curve for 'just' text.

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fgd
So you're saying this is the most valuable Django application ever? :)

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rwhitman
This is a real feather in the Django community's cap. Eat that Rails

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scoot
How long do I have to be on HN to get a downvote button? This isn't about
Django vs. Rails or any other framework, it's about the stack that Instagram
is built on, nothing more. There are no comparative metrics.

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bond
How much does it cost to run it?

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epo
Facebook didn't buy them for anything like a billion dollars, $1000 plus the
rest in shares is more like it.

Instagram's gamble on Instagram has become a gamble on Facebook (who are
risking nothing of value).

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regularfry
I'm intrigued they went with XFS for the filesystem. Is there any more info on
the thinking behind that decision?

~~~
Terretta
They pointed out the thinking behind it. If you check out Eric Hammond's blog
at Alestic, it expands on what was mentioned here:

<http://alestic.com/2009/09/ec2-consistent-snapshot>

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regularfry
Excellent, thanks for that. Looks mostly like a legacy decision which wouldn't
necessarily hold today.

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wazoox
Except for the part where you want integrity; AFAIK only xfs guarantees truly
atomic snapshotting thanks to xfs_freeze.

Furthermore, it's also (by an extremely large margin) your best choice if you
need a filesystem bigger than 16 TB.

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regularfry
Allegedly other filesystems have had a similar freeze added since then.

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wazoox
Actually it was added to the vfs layer IIRC, around 2.6.30.

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mrchess
Is this 3 backend engineers? Was there another team that maintained the app
and django app?

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zerostar07
A not so interesting infrastructure that FB will probably overhaul. I think
the author does not realize that facebook runs on custom server hardware,
php/Hiphop, a bunch of open source stuff they contribute to like cassandra,
memcached, varnish etc. The size of facebook and its platform is simply
staggering. I 'm pretty sure their engineers are going to be hard to be
impressed by these.

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pjscott
This architecture went far enough to get them acquired for a lot of money, so
while it may not be a miracle of ingenuity, it's worth studying as an example
of something that worked.

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waterlesscloud
It does raise the question of whether you even need any real ingenuity on the
back end for this sort of startup...

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regularfry
Thinking that you need ingenuity is often the root of problems.

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wavephorm
That's a long list of open source projects. I wonder did Instagram contribute
to any of them, or help out in any way?

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Tossrock
I am going to guess "no". For three people to scale a site to that size, I
imagine it was a daily battle just to keep the thing flying. Not to mention,
if they ran into a problem that could potentially be solved with some deep
magic done on a forked OSS project... or another ten extra large instances,
given their valuation I can imagine which direction they would lean.

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BobertK
three engineers and a cloud? sure beats three yards and a cloud of dust...

