On Wednesday, October 6, 2010, Instagram launched its mobile photo sharing service for iPhone. In six hours, the back-end operation, which was running off a single machine in Los Angeles, was completely overwhelmed.
Co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger knew immediately that they had to rework everything, and fast — especially if they were to be ready for the onslaught of weekend photos.
Today, just six months later, Instagram’s nearly three million users are regularly sharing north of four to five photos a second each weekend — Valentine’s Day usage peaked at six photo uploads per second. Impressively, the startup has been successfully supporting all of that activity on less than one hour of downtime per month.
In an interview with Mashable, Krieger details how he and Systrom went about scaling the service to meet the enormous and unexpected demand from users.
Avoiding Catastrophe
Co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger moved Instagram to the Amazon cloud with the help of a six pack of Red Bull. They took this photo during the all-nighter.
Day two for Instagram was an exciting one. Krieger called his dedicated server representative to inquire about getting a new machine — he was quoted a two day turnaround. Instagram, already fast-approaching 40,000 users, would need something much sooner to meet the weekend demand. “We needed to be on a platform where we could adjust in minute s, not days,” says...
