With more than 300 million active users, Instagram (Facebook, Inc.) is connecting people all over the world. The behind-the-scenes evolution of this platform — which now includes real-time data — has been powered by developers like Rodrigo Schmidt, engineering manager at Instagram. In this interview, George Gilbert, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, talked to Schmidt during the @Scale 2015 conference in San Jose.

Know What’s Trending

Schmidt shared how the Instagram servers analyze user input – photo uploads, hashtags and likes – to populate its new trending interface from Instagram’s browse feature, and it is all done in real time.

“It depends a lot on the scale of the system your building,” he explained. “At Instagram, we have bigger challenges because we have hundreds of millions of users … we need a much more powerful kind of system.” Schmidt went on to talk about Instagram’s distributed system and the prototypes it has gone through to perfect its real-time system.

Scaling is an important consideration for many businesses. “Today there are so many open-source tools,” said Schmidt. Businesses can start with these open-source tools, like Scribe, and build what they need in order to feed their content and connect with their users.

Analytics and other statistics are another important part of strategy, he added.

Watch the full interview below with Rodrigo Schmidt to get more info on scaling and real-time operations. And be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of @Scale 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE