Instagram Wrote Own Push Notification Server for Android, You Want It?

On Tuesday this week, Instagram released its famous (formerly) iOS based photography application on Android and after a record-breaking start, the company’s co-founder Mike Krieger has announced one of the most interesting details of the Android app. Instagram actually wrote its own push notification server for the Android installment of the app and it is offering it up as open-source. In the past 4 days, the server has had to handle over 5 million notifications and Instagram invited developers to fork, and pull-request if they have any suggestions for improvements or if they would like to use it for their own applications.

According to Krieger, the team behind Instagram learned a few lessons from scaling services on the level that they do and they are; “having real-time stats that can be added dynamically lets you diagnose and firefight without you having to wait to receive new data”, “it’s often one piece of the back-end infrastructure that becomes a bottleneck and figuring out the point at which your real, live appservers get stuck can help surface the issue” and finally, “If read capacity is likely to be a concern, bringing up read-slaves ahead of time and getting them in rotation is ideal; if any new read issues crop up however, know ahead of time what your options are for bringing more read capacity into the rotation.” If you are interested in Instagram’s push notification server option, you can check out node2dm on Github here.