How to Scale a Billion Dollar Startup Like Instagram

Instagram, the photo-sharing startup co-founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger that was acquired by Facebook for a billion dollars, is an amazing story for many reasons.

However, despite the recent outage of Amazon Web Services (AWS), one of the reasons it was able to scale so fast was by using keeping things simple in-house and taking advantage of connecting to resources outside.

In April (2012) after the Facebook acquisition, Mike Krieger gave a talk on "Scaling Instagram" to give some perspective on the back-end and engineering while growing so fast and having to make adjustments while going at full-speed.

Perhaps this sums it up best:

"The cleanest solution with the fewest moving parts as possible."

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