Most of Instagram's "technology for handing photos" uses S3, as described in previous Instagram tech blog posts. Instagram however has a massive big data structure which would lead to any big company getting high value out of them. Why use the tools they open sourced last week to improve your reliability if you can just acquire the entire team?
the thing is that they don't have it sorted. Trying to do any sort of photo management(move, delete, edit) in Facebook is a pain and I always receive database errors thrown back at me.
