Welcome to the Instagram Engineering Blog, where we share insights on building and scaling our service. As we mentioned in our previous blog, we’re big fans of tools and techniques for introspecting our live traffic to see what exactly is going on. One tool we use frequently is PGFouine, a query traffic analyzer for PostgreSQL. We recently found that we also needed a similar tool for Redis, our sw

Welcome to the Instagram Engineering Blog, where we share insights on building and scaling our service. One of the questions we always get asked at meet-ups and conversations with other engineers is, “what’s your stack?” 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

Welcome to the Instagram Engineering Blog, where we share insights on building and scaling our service. In our office, we have a pretty amazing paper shredder. Seriously, the thing shreds just about anything. It even has a special slot for credit cards (why anyone would want to regularly shred credit cards is beyond me, but I digress…). One day, after shredding some paper, I thought to myself: shr

Welcome to the Instagram Engineering Blog, where we share insights on building and scaling our service. When transitioning systems, sometimes you have to build a little scaffolding. At Instagram, we recently had to do just that: for legacy reasons, we need to keep around a mapping of about 300 million photos back to the user ID that created them, in order to know which shard to query (see more inf