This. Just. This.

In response to an honest comment about some of Instagram's rather "ordinary engineering choices", mikeyk (Co-founder @ Instagram) had what I consider the perfect response: 

We (at IG) aren't claiming to be doing revolutionary things on infrastructure--but one thing I found super valuable when scaling Instagram in the early days was having access to stories from other companies on how they've scaled. That's the spirit in which I encourage our engineers to blog about our DB scaling, our search infra, etc--I think the more open we are (as a company, but more broadly as an industry) about technical approaches + solutions, the better off we'll be.

This could be the anthem for HS and is a key reason our industry continues to get better. And in case you are interested, here are just a few of those stories from Instagram:

• Instagram Architecture: 14 Million Users, Terabytes Of Photos, 100s Of Instances, Dozens Of Technologies
• 3 Secrets To Lightning Fast Mobile Design At Instagram
• Instagram Improved Their App's Performance. Here's How
• Instagram Architecture Update: What’s New With Instagram?
• Instagram Strategy To Radically Reduce Traffic: Kill All The Spambots!

On HackerNews

Comments

[Charl]

Todd,
I couldn't agree more. Two years ago I was asked to stabilize a system that was rather core to our business, running on a cluster of 8 machines. It was somewhat archaic (written for java 1.4), and had several "interesting" design features, but it was actually working really well. This was my first time working on a system of this nature, and I felt slightly overwhelmed, but in many ways highscalability.com and all the websites and articles I found through it helped me along. This system has now been running very stable for a year - the only downtime being due to things outside of the system itself, with a new and much improved version currently being tested. So great anthem. Thank you!