Facebook Moved 20 Billion Instagram Photos And No One Noticed
June 27, 2014
Are you an Instagram user? Then your photos are now being stored by Facebook, which bought Instagram in 2012, according to Wired.
This spring, Facebook quietly moved 20 billion photos from Amazon EC2, the seminal cloud computing service, to servers hosted by the social networking giant. The entire process was handled by eight engineers.
Facebook calls the process “Instagration,” which wasn’t exactly easy to perform. Of the move, Instagram founder Mike Krieger notes "The users are still in the same car they were in at the beginning of the journey, but we've swapped out every single part without them noticing."
Facebook may now be hosting Instagram's photos, but that doesn't mean the subsidiary is sharing data with the mother ship. Facebook, for example, can't use your behavior on Instagram to target ads on Facebook -- or vice versa. "One of the things we had to do was really silo the information, which ends up being important for privacy and other reasons," Krieger says.
Facebook purchased Instagram for $1 billion.
See also: Major Instagram Update Ushers In New Photo Editing Tools, Hipstamatic's New Video App Cinamatic Launches To Take On Facebook's Instagram, and Facebook's Slingshot Goes International Just A Week After Official Launch.
