The guys over at Instagram wrote a nice article about their technology stack. They are using a lot of the Amazon AWS services, from S3 to Ec2 and ELB. Instagram is written in Django. PostgreSQL is powering their databases together with Redis for their lists and sessions. When they started sharing their PostgreSQL cluster they switched from PostSQL Geo to Apache SOLR for their geo API. Gearman is working with 200 workers to get data asynchronously through the system and into their streaming data clients.
We thought it would be fun to give a sense of all the systems that power Instagram, at a high-level; you can look forward to more in-depth descriptions of some of these systems in the future. This is how our system has evolved in the just-over-1-year that we’ve been live, and while there are parts we’re always re-working, this is a glimpse of how a startup with a small engineering team can scale to our 14 million+ users in a little over a year.
via Instagram Engineering • What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens of Technologies.
No surprises, but it looks like a solid stack. I’ve been using most of the tools myself in earlier projects. I was a bit surprised about the size of their instances. I would’ve used more but smaller instances, but apparently the IO is not the bottleneck. Food for thought..
