Facebook has moved 20 billion Instagram photos to its own data center

“Instagration.” That’s Facebook’s term for the live migration of Instagram from Amazon’s servers to a Facebook data center. The firm shared yesterday that it completed the transition without so much as a whisper to Instagram’s 200 million active users. Planning the secret transition took “about a year,” according to Wired, and it was handled by a small team of just eight engineers at first. The actual migration took just one month, led by a 20-person team. According to Instagram founder founder Mike Krieger, the transition required Instagram to first move from Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service to Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud. VPC enabled Krieger to “create a logical network that reached beyond Amazon into the Facebook data centre,” Wired reports.

Your Instagram photos aren’t where they used to be. This spring, even as some 200 million people were using Instagram on their smartphones, a small team of engineers moved the photo sharing service from Amazon’s cloud computing service — where it was built in 2010 — into a data centre operated by Facebook, which bought Instagram in 2012. “The users are still in the same car they were in at the beginning of the journey,” says Instagram founder Mike Krieger, “but we’ve swapped out every single part without them noticing.” Facebook calls it the “Instagration,” and it was an unprecedented undertaking for Mark Zuckerberg and company. Facebook has moved other acquired properties like FriendFeedinto its data centres, but typically, they were small projects that involved shutting a service down before moving it into the Facebook universe. The Instagram switch was the live migration of an enormous — and enormously popular — operation. “The service couldn’t take any disruption,” says Facebook engineer George Cabrera. Facebook won’t say how many virtual machines were needed to run Instagram on Amazon, but it was in “the thousands.” And the service now stores over 20 billion digitals photos.