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Comment by joslin01 | Hacker News Reader

I remember when Instagram had to shard their database to keep up with demand, and the article was so popular among developers. "Check it out, they split up the databases! Whoa!" I'm not trying to dismiss their work, but it was a relatively ordinary engineering feat.

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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 is exactly right and further I think comments like above scare a lot of people out of posting information that may be useful to others. I'm quite surprised by the sourness. Thank you for sharing!

Thanks for sharing your stories and lessons learnt. Also appreciated is your explaining in the context of the larger Fb sys infra and the services instagram engg. deliberately decide to rely on.

That is the right attitude and sorry, don't mean to dismiss that either. I was just kinda piggy-backing the OP's story with a small tid-bit that I found funny. It's more about poking fun at the "wow!" reactions than it is directly at you.

Thank you for sharing this information. Keep it up and yes, the better off we'll all be with more articles like this from large scale companies.

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