You Click "Add to Story" and Instagram Does Way More Than You Think (opens in new tab)

The other day I was randomly scrolling through Instagram and a question popped into my head: How does Instagram Story upload actually work? Not from a user's perspective. From an engineering perspective. You click a picture, add some text, maybe throw in a song, hit "Your Story", and within a few seconds your followers can start viewing it. The whole thing feels effortless. But there has to be a lot happening behind the scenes. Now obviously, none of us actually know how Instagram's internal ...