6 ms·
How To Scale A $1 Billion Startup (Instagram Co-Founder Mike Krieger)
- mailarchis 15y agoFav Quote “surely we’ll have hired someone experienced before we actually need to shard”
- simondlr 15y agoFantastic to think 2 engineers can scale it so far. It is exciting to think that a small team from anywhere in the world can think up the next big thing and scale it easily from wherever.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- davidw 15y agoSomeone want to get lots of karma points by summing up the text of this so that we don't have to read through it one screen at a time?
- ShaunCodeweaver 15y agoDespite usually hating viewing slides without the presentation, I actually find this style very good for getting the point across. Hammer down and there are some good quotes/ideas in there.
- davidw 15y agoThey basically wrote most of it down, which could be easily excerpted into, say, some normal text that one could quickly read.
- brlewis 15y agoThere's a lot in there about specifically what they did, with repeated cautions not to overcomplicate a scaling solution. For most of us on HN, though, I think only these slides are needed: 180 don't over-optimize or expect to know ahead of time how site will scale 184 few, if any, unsolvable scaling challenges for a social startup 185 have fun
- aidos 15y agohttp://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/13649370142/what-powers-instagram-hundreds-of-instances-dozens-of http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/13649370142/wha...
- freshfey 15y agoI think the biggest takeaway here is "don't reinvent the wheel", which I think is also a big problem for every engineer/hacker. Because we tend to build our own solutions as soon as we don't like an element or how something is handled etc. But this also causes that you lose focus and forget the bigger picture ("our users don't care whether we wrote the db ourselves").
- hessenwolf 15y agoIf my software engineering course left me with one thing, it was to remember the three rules of software, "reuse, reuse, reuse". I think it might have been quoted from Deitel & Deitel C++.
- treelovinhippie 15y agoSo I guess TechCrunch will be milking this "$1 billion startup" title for a while...
- Aqua_Geek 15y agoSeriously. The 30+ million users is the more relevant number here.
- Julianhearn 15y agoEven the 30+ million is not relevant, Facebook with already have all of those users. So they didn't buy any users, no revenue, no profit, just some technology which they much have been able to build themselves for a fraction of the price.
- jaredsohn 15y agoIt is relevant since this was a technical talk. The speaker didn't even mention the Facebook acquisition; he just said that they've been in the news lately and can't talk about it.
- Aqua_Geek 15y ago30+ million users relevant to Facebook? Of course not. 30+ million users relevant to a talk about scaling? Absolutely. The title of the article is "How To Scale A $1 Billion Startup" - but it's a tech talk about how to scale to support their userbase, not a business talk about how to increase quarterly profits. Hence, the number of users is far more relevant to the discussion than how much they were bought out for.
- abjr 15y ago30 million sign-ups or 30 million ACTIVE users?
- methoddk 15y agoBecause that's what TechCrunch does. Stop supporting them and posting their articles to HN!
- jreposa 15y agoI love that favicon is the first tip. It's got me more than once, which is a sad testament to my ability as an engineer.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- AznHisoka 15y agoScaling something with a million users is easy in comparison to getting those million users first. Please write an article about that.
- xianshou 15y agoI was at this talk, and I think that by far the most important point was that you should get great advisers and mentors. Instagram started with an okay stack and terrible configuration. They ended up doing great on both counts; now they have almost no downtime, they deploy several times an hour, and their comprehensive tests take only 5 minutes to run. Some of that came from skill and prior knowledge, but the majority from adaptability and the willingness to switch quickly when advisers (e.g. Adam d'Angelo) suggested better alternatives.
- devinfoley 15y agoHe said that they had 2 engineers in 2010, 3 engineers in 2011, and 5 engineers 2012, but only 2.5 backend engineers. I'm surprised that the number of engineers is so low, considering that they had 15 employees. Maybe the figures above don't include mobile engineers? But then what would the other 2.5 be doing? Thanks to Instagram and AirBnb for putting this on. It was an amazing event.
- gsmaverick 15y agoI think he's only counting engineers working on the back-end and not those who are working on the iPhone and Android apps.
- shaynesweeney 15y agoNo he was counting all of us :)
- devinfoley 15y agoYou guys are nuts!
- loverobots 15y agoProbably all were doing a little bit here and there but only two were hired 100% for that purpose. 13 person team with 30 million users...amazing! (Amazon and cloud are the unsung heroes.)
- msie 15y agoThe backend sounds really complicated now. Anyone draw a diagram of it?
- Aloisius 15y agoReally complicated? While I'm sure some of the deep details are messy, the overall architecture is textbook standard. A search engine (SOLR), a load balancer (HAProxy), an app server (django), a replicated/sharded database (postgres) and a replicated k/v store (redis).
- beambot 15y agoDoes anyone know if there is a video of the talk?