1. Scaling Instagram
AirBnB Tech Talk 2012
Mike Krieger
Instagram

2. me
- Co-founder, Instagram
- Previously: UX & Front-end
@ Meebo
- Stanford HCI BS/MS
- @mikeyk on everything

6. communicating and
sharing in the real world

7. 30+ million users in less
than 2 years

8. the story of how we
scaled it

9. a brief tangent

10. the beginning

11. Text

12. 2 product guys

13. no real back-end
experience

14. analytics & python @
meebo

15. CouchDB

16. CrimeDesk SF

18. let’s get hacking

19. good components in
place early on

20. ...but were hosted on a
single machine
somewhere in LA

22. less powerful than my
MacBook Pro

23. okay, we launched.
now what?

24. 25k signups in the first
day

25. everything is on fire!

26. best & worst day of our
lives so far

27. load was through the
roof

28. first culprit?

30. favicon.ico

31. 404-ing on Django,
causing tons of errors

32. lesson #1: don’t forget
your favicon

33. real lesson #1: most of
your initial scaling
problems won’t be
glamorous

34. favicon

35. ulimit -n

36. memcached -t 4

37. prefork/postfork

38. friday rolls around

39. not slowing down

40. let’s move to EC2.

43. scaling = replacing all
components of a car
while driving it at
100mph

44. since...

45. “"canonical [architecture]
of an early stage startup
in this era."
(HighScalability.com)

46. Nginx &
Redis &
Postgres &
Django.

47. Nginx & HAProxy &
Redis & Memcached &
Postgres & Gearman &
Django.

48. 24h Ops

51. our philosophy

52. 1 simplicity

53. 2 optimize for
minimal operational
burden

54. 3 instrument
everything

55. walkthrough:
1 scaling the database
2 choosing technology
3 staying nimble
4 scaling for android

56. 1 scaling the db

57. early days

58. django ORM, postgresql

59. why pg? postgis.

60. moved db to its own
machine

61. but photos kept growing
and growing...

62. ...and only 68GB of
RAM on biggest
machine in EC2

63. so what now?

64. vertical partitioning

65. django db routers make
it pretty easy

66. def db_for_read(self, model):
if app_label == 'photos':
return 'photodb'

67. ...once you untangle all
your foreign key
relationships

68. a few months later...

69. photosdb > 60GB

70. what now?

71. horizontal partitioning!

72.