[System Design Tech Case Study Pulse #98] 80 Million Photos Daily : How Instagram Photo Sharing Actually Works

With detailed explanation and flow chart....

Hi All,

Instagram's selection of Apache Cassandra as a core component of its data infrastructure enables it to manage over 80 million new photos every day. This incredible feat allows Instagram to provide real-time photo sharing and interaction for its billion-plus users worldwide.

Learn how to System design —Design Lyft

[System Design Tech Case Study Pulse #9] Facebook's News Feed Algorithm Marvel: How it Serves 2.9 Billion Daily Active Users Using PyTorch and Cassandra

Let me dive deep into how Instagram engineered this system, exploring the key architectural decisions, scaling strategies, and optimizations that enable Cassandra to handle this massive volume of photo metadata and user interactions.

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System Overview 

Before we delve into Instagram's Cassandra architecture, let's look at some key metrics that highlight the scale of its operations:

- New photos per day: 80 million+

- Active users: 1 billion+

- Total photos stored: 50 billion+

- Data ingested daily: Petabytes

- Peak writes per second: Hundreds of thousands

- Read latency: Single-digit milliseconds

- Availability: 99.99%+

- Global deployment: Multiple data centers worldwide

- Cassandra clusters: Dozens

- Nodes per cluster: Hundreds

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Learn system design pulses -

[System Design Pulse #1] Understanding Latency and Throughput: Critical Factors in System Design and Performance Tuning

[System Design Pulse #2] Striking the Right Balance: Optimizing Availability and Consistency in Distributed Architectures

[System Design Pulse #3] THE theorem of System Design and why you MUST know it - Brewer theorem

[System Design Pulse #4] How Distributed Message Queues Work?

[System Design Pulse #5] Breaking It Down: The Magic Behind Microservices Architecture

[System Design Pulse #6] Why Availability Patterns Are So Crucial in System Design?

[System Design Pulse #7] How Consistency Patterns helps Design Robust and Efficient Systems?

[System Design Pulse #8] Caching is Crucial : How Caching Slashes Latency and Supercharges Performance

[System Design Pulse #9] Why these Key Components are Crucial for System Design.

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How it works ( tech in depth) —

1. User Interaction:

- A user uploads a photo or interacts with content through Instagram's app or website.

- Instagram Application Servers process these actions.

2. Application-Level Processing:

- Feed Generation Service prepares user feeds.

- Engagement Tracking Service monitors likes, comments, and views.