Maaz Ullah Khan Warsi

Honestly, at full Instagram scale (1B+ users), you're not looking at thousands — you're looking at **millions per month**. Here's a rough breakdown based on real-world architecture patterns: **Compute (app servers, API gateways, feed generation workers):** - Thousands of nodes across multiple regions - Kubernetes clusters (EKS/GKE) with auto-scaling - ~$2–5M/month **Storage (images, videos, Stories, Reels):** - Instagram stores *petabytes* of media - S3/GCS hot tier + Glacier for cold storage - Video transcoding pipelines (FFmpeg + GPU instances) - ~$3–8M/month **CDN / Bandwidth:** - This is the silent killer — serving billions of image/video requests daily - Cloudflare/Akamai/CloudFront - ~$2–5M/month **Databases (Cassandra clusters, PostgreSQL, Redis):** - Instagram uses Cassandra heavily for feeds - Multi-region replication, massive Redis clusters for caching - ~$1–3M/month **ML / Recommendation infra:** - GPU clusters for feed ranking, content moderation - KServe or similar for model serving - ~$1–2M/month **Total ballpark: $10–25M/month** at true Instagram scale But here's the thing — no one starts there. Even Instagram started on a single Django server. The architecture evolves as you grow. What stage are you actually planning for? Are you thinking MVP or post-funding scale?