7 ms·
The Instagram Architecture Facebook Bought for a Cool Billion Dollars
- nickbarnwell 15y agoPositing 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
- jack-r-abbit 15y agoI 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 15y agoAgreed. 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?
- Retric 15y agoThey 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.
- ajslater 15y agoDidn't Sequoia make a big YouTube investment suspiciously immediately before acquisition?
- watmough 15y agoThis is one user that will be deleting this off of his phone. Darn-it!
- prof_hobart 15y agoPaying $1B for a company partly because they've "created $1billion in value in ~550 days" is a bit of a tautological line of reasoning.
- nostromo 15y agoI can't see this as a user acquisition play. The number of Instagram users that are already on Facebook must be, what, 90%? Maybe more? So, it's obviously not for talent ($100mm per head? no way...), users, or tech. That leaves it as a competitive play. They took Instagram off the market to keep it out of the hands of Apple and Google.
- sakri 15y agoWhether it's acquisition or retaining, every user owns an expensive phone, the demographic advertisers lust for.
- jack-r-abbit 15y agoBut to keep what out of the hands of Apple and Google? Apple and Google don't need the talent or tech either. Instagram's only real value was users. Competitive play or not... it had to be for the users. What else is there? Break room snacks?
- ndcrandall 15y agoFacebook definitely had other motives for doing this. One such speculation is here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3819245 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3819245 Others have been for their user base while some say it's for a talent acquisition (which I highly doubt). The title doesn't seem to imply that's why they bought Instagram.
- bigiain 15y agoI've got other suspicions too… I wonder what Instagram's privacy policy says about things like the exif data on all your photos? Almost certainly all geo-tagged. A bunch of data like "how often and how quickly individual users upgrade their iPhones". Cynical-me wonders how much value FB placed on the non-FB social graph that Instagram built when it hoovered up everybodies contact list?
- ollerac 15y agoare companies only allowed to have one reason for their acquisitions? i assume the complexity of instagram's architecture would reflect the technical prowess of the team and this would be very important to facebook
- maratd 15y agoThe article mentions they have a team of 3 engineers. You don't pay that much cash for 3 dudes who managed to boot some instances on EC2 and install an off-the-shelf open source stack.
- gbog 15y agoYou are depreciating their work in a way that is not that of a real gentleman. Maybe you are also working on a startup and would like to make it to where Instagram guys are? Me too, you know. And for their tech stack what its impressing is that they chose very wisely IMO: if I had to build from scratch any Web or mobile app I wouldn't do differently (Python n PostgreSQL, etc)
- GiraffeNecktie 15y agoHe's being a bit flippant but his point is correct. You don't spend a billion dollars just to get three engineers, no matter how clever they are.
- maratd 15y ago
- iusable 15y ago3 web ops engineers for 30+ (before android release) million users & 100+ EC2 instances = WOW!
- rbanffy 15y agoBehold the power of the cloud.
- blantonl 15y agoAmazon Web Services just got a huge shout-out today with this news. I self manage a large Web property that has 25+ AWS instances, plus some metal with ServerBeach and 1000TB.com. I also personally do all the development work on the site, as well as managing day-to-day operations and most support. Yes, it is possible to run a multi-million dollar business by yourself with lots of servers, thanks to the cloud - in this case AWS.
- iusable 15y agoHoly Cow! www.radioreference.com is that big already? Props! 570k users and 3k feeds = that infra? Streaming must be a bitch.
- zerostar07 15y agoI 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/ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/instagram.com/
- iusable 15y agoWhat 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.
- 15y ago
- fgd 15y agoSo you're saying this is the most valuable Django application ever? :)
- rbanffy 15y agoNo. It's just the most expensive ;-) I'd never trade my URL shortener or my podcast+connected-TV-backend for a photo sharing app.
- rwhitman 15y agoThis is a real feather in the Django community's cap. Eat that Rails
- krsunny 15y agoFor some reason I was thinking Drupal the first time I read through the article... Drupal.
- scoot 15y agoHow 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.
- simonw 15y agoI'll be interested to see what happens with Pinterest (also Django).
- wavephorm 15y agoThat's a long list of open source projects. I wonder did Instagram contribute to any of them, or help out in any way?
- Tossrock 15y agoI 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.
- zerostar07 15y agoA 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.
- pjscott 15y agoThis 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.
- waterlesscloud 15y agoIt does raise the question of whether you even need any real ingenuity on the back end for this sort of startup...
- zerostar07 15y agoyou probably need some to create it though
- regularfry 15y agoThinking that you need ingenuity is often the root of problems.
- zerostar07 15y ago... in the sense that the typeface of famous books is worth studying as an example of how to write a good book?
- cageface 15y agoOr, we've learned that even the biggest web companies can now be built with fairly vanilla technology and that obsessing over clever bespoke scaling schemes is largely a waste of time.
- bond 15y agoHow much does it cost to run it?
- BobertK 15y agothree engineers and a cloud? sure beats three yards and a cloud of dust...
- mrchess 15y agoIs this 3 backend engineers? Was there another team that maintained the app and django app?
- epo 15y agoFacebook 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).
- regularfry 15y agoI'm intrigued they went with XFS for the filesystem. Is there any more info on the thinking behind that decision?
- Terretta 15y agoThey 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 http://alestic.com/2009/09/ec2-consistent-snapshot
- regularfry 15y agoExcellent, thanks for that. Looks mostly like a legacy decision which wouldn't necessarily hold today.
- wazoox 15y agoExcept 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.
- regularfry 15y agoAllegedly other filesystems have had a similar freeze added since then.
- wazoox 15y agoActually it was added to the vfs layer IIRC, around 2.6.30.
- riledhel 15y agoWhy wouldn't? is there a better alternative to freeze a filesystem and take a AWS snapshot from it?