Instagram’s birth in October of 2010 depicted a simple platform for photo sharing by a 2-person team. Its founders Kevin Systrom, a management science student and Mike Krieger, a symbolic systems student at Stanford had just enough technical knowledge to build the first version of this app. As soon as the app was released Systrom had to leave all the technical work to Krieger and focus on how to run the business.
Getting acquired by Facebook within 2 years for a whopping $1 billion and working from Silicon Valley with a team of around 100 engineers, Instagram has come a long way. Almost a decade after the first release a lot has changed in their lives. One thing, however, has remained the same. The philosophy of the founders: “Do the simple thing first”. This started as their survival tactic but soon turned into a mantra that every engineer at Instagram today has burned it into their brains.
As the complexity of the app started getting ambitious, the engineering behind it only got tougher. When the aim is to inspire every user’s creativity most simply and elegantly you have to build a smooth app. This is why both the founders have always chosen practicality over perfection. To do this Instagram needed the best engineers and it could only hire six such engineers before getting acquired by Facebook. Facebooks’ thorough hiring process made it easy for Instagram to not compromise on the talent needed to build the platform.
As the userbase increased and stands at over 300 million users posting more than 70 million posts a day, Instagram has used automated processes from the parent company to deploy the software. Since the developer’s team is small and the app is focused on user experience, the changes rolled out are quicker and too many compared to most other apps. There is no pressure from the parent company to adopt its technologies. The back end of the service is written entirely in Python along with a little C++, which has remained constant since its inception.
When it comes to the storage systems, Instagram has shifted to Facebook’s data centres from Amazon Web Services. The advantage of this is cost-efficiency, ease during integration and round the clock in-house support. Mostly “do the simple thing first” is always a priority for the team but when they have to choose between this and simplicity then simplicity takes the first place. Simple user interface along with simple engineering is the motto followed at Instagram.
Many new features have been introduced on this platform which helps users in getting popular by adding more followers. No matter how good your account is sometimes you do need external support to increase your follower base. We advise you to get it done through the right channels as the new security updates by Instagram ensures dismissal of fake accounts and accounts performing illegal activities. If you want new genuine followers to your account all you need to do is check this.