Instagram serves an incredible amount of traffic, reliably and steadily so, by running Python (with a little help from Django) under the hood.

Each day, over 95 million photos and videos are shared on Instagram. The unstoppable photo-centric social media platform has over 600 million registered users — 400 million of whom are active every day. Talk about operating at scale: Instagram kills it at levels most companies can barely even dream about.

Even more impressive, though, is the fact that Instagram serves this incredible amount of traffic, reliably and steadily so, by running Python (with a little help from Django) under the hood. Yes, that Python — the easy to learn, jack-of-all-trades general purpose programming language. The one everybody in the industry dismisses as, “Yeah, Python is great in so many ways, too bad it’s not really scalable.”

Ahem. Four. Hundred. Million. Users. Per. Day. Not only has Instagram scaled to become the biggest Python user in the world, but the company recently moved over to Python 3 with zero user experience interruption. Instagram engineers Hui Ding and Lisa Guo talked with The New Stack to share the Python love and describe the Python 3 migration experience.

​​​​​​​Read the full interview with the programmers


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