What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens of Technologies

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…

Dismissing Python Garbage Collection at Instagram

By dismissing the Python garbage collection (GC) mechanism, which reclaims memory by collecting and freeing unused data, Instagram can run 10% more efficiently. Yes, you heard it right! By disabling GC, we can reduce the memory footprint and…

Open-sourcing a 10x reduction in Apache Cassandra tail latency

At Instagram, we have one of the world’s largest deployments of the Apache Cassandra database. We began using Cassandra in 2012 to replace Redis and support product use cases like fraud detection, Feed, and the Direct…

Static Analysis at Scale: An Instagram Story

How Instagram develops and uses linting and codemod tools…

Web Service Efficiency at Instagram with Python

Instagram currently features the world’s largest deployment of the Django web framework, which is written entirely in Python. We initially chose to use Python because of its reputation for simplicity and practicality, which aligns well with our…

Storing hundreds of millions of simple key-value pairs in Redis

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…