LinkedIn started in 2003 with 2700 members in the first week and has since grown to over 400 million members globally. It initially had a monolithic Java application called Leo serving all pages and using a single SQL database. To scale, LinkedIn developed its first dedicated service for the member connection graph and another for search. It later introduced replica databases, extracted services from Leo using a service-oriented architecture, added caching, and implemented Kafka as a universal data pipeline. LinkedIn now has over 750 services, uses multiple data centers, and architectures like Rest.li and various data infrastructure solutions to continue scaling as a global site with massive traffic and data volumes.