Instagram

Photo & Video Sharing Platform

1B+

Active Users

200+

Countries

95M+

Photos/Day

$20B

Acquisition Price

Company Overview

Instagram transformed social media by focusing on visual content sharing. Founded in 2010, Instagram grew to 1 billion users before being acquired by Facebook for $1 billion in 2012.

The platform's success demonstrates how a focused product vision and efficient technical architecture can achieve massive scale through viral growth and user engagement.

Business Model

Advertising revenue through sponsored posts
E-commerce integration with shopping features
Creator monetization tools and partnerships
Data-driven advertising platform

Context

• Global photo-sharing platform serving 1B+ users
• Media processing and CDN distribution at scale
• Real-time feed algorithms and personalization

Patterns & Typical Choices

• API Gateway: rate-limits, auth, request shaping (e.g., Zuul/Envoy)

• Storage: metadata (KV/Doc), sessions (in-memory), search (inverted index), analytics (data lake)

• Messaging: queues vs streams; idempotency; outbox/CDC to avoid dual-writes

• Caching: edge CDN + service caches; stampede protection (locks, jittered TTLs)

• Observability: trace IDs across hops; RED/USE metrics with SLOs

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