Instagram is a social networking platform that is built around sharing videos and photos. It had its first launch in October 2010 on iOS devices, then became available in April 2012 on Android OS. Furthermore, Instagram is amongst the biggest social networking platforms nowadays, yet not everyone is familiar with the technology that it has. Here, we will briefly discuss what is the technology behind Instagram. But before we dig deeper on that matter, let us first discuss a short background of this social media platform.
Instagram Short Background
Instagram was developed in San Francisco by Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom. They first made a mobile application called Burbn, which they thought was just the same as any other mobile applications established at that time. So they decided to focus mainly on communication via images.
They stripped out all features from the application, except for the uploading, liking, and commenting. The application was named Instagram, which actually denoted to the mere fact that users were sending a kind of instant telegram.
The app, as we have said above, was launched on October 6, 2010, and its growth was instantaneous. From only a few users, it soon became the number one photography application gathering about 100,000 users in just a week, accumulating about 1 million in just two months. The inventors say that the application itself took just 8 weeks to get built. It was then bought by Facebook for $1 billion in 2012. Now, it has about 600 million active users and still rapidly increasing.
But what is really the technology behind Instagram?
Instagram Technology
Instagram is a free social networking and photo-sharing mobile application, which may work best with smartphones. This lets its users in taking, editing, and sharing photos or short videos –with the option to apply a number of filters in order to change the way the video or photo looks. The posts or contents can be liked by users who follow you. There are also some cheap and real instagram likes that you can now buy on different reputable sites.
Moreover, the developers of Instagram credit so much of their success in selecting their tools very wisely through allowing its core: keeping it so simple, not reinventing the wheel, and going with the solid and proven technologies when you can. The engineering blog of Instagram drawn its development stack that is actually a set of libraries, languages, tools, and IDEs used in developing an app.
Instagram also uses a Django-based stack that runs on the Ubuntu 11.04 servers. For the storage, it uses the PostgreSQL. Additionally, there are additional layers for balancing the load, queues, push notifications, and some other tasks, yet for most of the stack of Instagram is consists of dependable tools, which are proven to function.
With the high-quality technology that’s used in the making of Instagram, it is with no surprise that this social media platform has become a hit and made a great communication media for millions and millions of people all over the world.