In our world, any mobile challenges are quickly met with new solutions. Not very long ago people were discussing Instagram’s new look and even figured out the “Pros” and “Cons” of this update. Instead of focusing on the design we decided to take a closer look at the Instagram clones and found out why they are so popular and the reason people duplicate this well-known app.
WOULD YOU LIKE TO FOLLOW ME?
Twitter is one of the main “follow me” social media websites, and was recently replaced as one of the favorites by Instagram. The reason why is simplicity. Instagram suggests that users view pics and photos, share it, tag it, like or comment and simply enjoy. Compared to Twitter, Instagram doesn’t need much explanation and description for shared photos or videos and moreover it is responsive. It could be that this is the key advantage to help attract visitors. Using an attached camera people post photos and videos in real time as soon as they are made.
JUST A CLONE OR A BETTER SOLUTION?
Want to have a copy of Instagram for your business or any other needs? It’s not unusual desire nowadays. Let’s take a closer look at some copies:
- Pic-O-Gram is a clone on both Android and IOS. It helps to share your life and is fully packed with image filters, video filters and social connections. It has the ability to share posts on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram and more. As an added advantage it also has a connected PHP Web Script which can be generated for Instagram itself.
- PicYou, an Instagram alternative was introduced in July 2011, is up for sale on Flippa. It has all the above listed features just like the original Instagram. According to the listing, 2.4 million photos have been uploaded using PicYou so far, and the app has attracted some 600,000 registered users.
For those who want to share a ton of images and connect with people, building this clone of Instagram will be a good tool for business.
WHAT REALLY MAKES IT SIMPLE?
When it comes to selecting tools Instagram developers prefer to use something simple and easy-to-use, in other words, whatever works. Their mix of SQL databases with NoSQL tools like Redis and the hosting of traditional Ubuntu servers in Amazon’s cloud makes it more on the cutting edge. Let’s consider it closer.
- Hosting. Instagram runs on the Ubuntu Linux 11.04 (“Natty Narwhal”) server on Amazon EC2. The reason was to choose something that runs smoothly and efficiently to avoid freezes and stacks in the traffic. Natty was a good solution to skip negative customers.
- Load Balance. Every request goes through Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer, with 3 NGINX instances behind it that can be swapped in and out (and are automatically taken out of rotation if they fail a health check). Amazon’s Route53 for DNS is a good tool for GUI in the AWS console as it also keeps the loading balance
- Server. Instagram uses Gunicorn as a WSGI server, because it is much easier to configure, and less CPU-intensive. To run commands in many situations simultaneously (like deploying code), they use Fabric, which recently added a useful parallel mode so that deploys only take a matter of seconds.
- Data storage. Most of Instagram‘s data lives in PostgreSQL. For numerous key value pairs for fast feed Instagram uses Redis instead of Apache as a web server. All in all Instagram uses a very impressive setup to avoid the down time that has plagued many similar services hit with the same kind of exponential growth.
Our company has developed a great variety of applications for different businesses and platforms (whether iOS or Android). We offer customization features according to your needs and wants. All the above mentioned technologies are already being used by our experienced specialists.
We hope this article has helped you to find the best solution. In case you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact us.
Last updated on December 17th, 2019
