Facebook secretly moved all of your Instagram photos to its own servers

“Instagration.”

That’s Facebook’s term for the live migration of Instagram — all of Instagram — from Amazon’s servers to a Facebook data center. The firm shared yesterday that it completed the transition without so much as a whisper to Instagram’s 200 million active users.

Planning the secret transition took “about a year,” according to Wired, and a small team of just eight engineers handled it at first. The actual migration took just one month with a 20-person team.

According to Instagram founder Mike Krieger, the transition required Instagram to first move from Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing service to Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud. VPC enabled Krieger to “create a logical network that reached beyond Amazon into the Facebook data center,” Wired reports.

The migration was completed in April, but Facebook claims it will keep Instagram’s user data separate to protect the privacy of Instagram users. This suggests that your behavior on Instagram won’t influence Facebook’s aggressive tracking efforts, even if ads will eventually play a big role on Instagram.

Looking back, it didn’t take long for Instagram to start mirroring Facebook. As soon as Instagram debuted Web profiles, Facebook’s influence was clear.

But now, Instagram is firmly in Facebook’s DNA.