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Pinterest Architecture Update - 18M Visitors, 10x Growth, 12 Employees, 410 TB

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Re: Pinterest Architecture Update - 18M Visitors, 10x Growth, 12 Employees, 410 TB

#41

Post by whalesalad »

edwinnathaniel wrote: post #36
whalesalad wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a kabillion factors to consider though. With that many users, yes the exact implementation matters less and the ancillary systems and how they interact are more critical. But, building the platform, being able to iterate quickly and deliver robust functionality along the way is important as well. Not that Ruby hasn't, but Django and Python have really proved their worth with some of the heavy hitters recently…

... and when we look at the um... "old" fart Java... their roster is even more impressive: LinkedIN, Google, NetFlix, Amazon. Just commenting ... :D

Touché ;)

I mean really we're all just moving 1's and 0's around.

Re: Pinterest Architecture Update - 18M Visitors, 10x Growth, 12 Employees, 410 TB

#42

Post by tomwaddington »

kitsune_ wrote: post #17
carson wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are just counting EC2 cost. The AWS cost for 410TB of S3 storage is around $39k. You would need to add in BW cost on top of that. It is also interesting that they seem to be using Akamai for a CDN instead of Cloudfront so not a completely AWS based solution. I wish they went into what they are storing in S3. 410TB is a lot of storage. My initial guess was cached images but 80M objects breaks down to 5MB per objec…

From these figures they seem to burn over 100k per month on outsourced cloud services alone. Holy shit.

If they're at 30+ staff, they've managed to keep hosting to a pretty small chunk of total budget.

Re: Pinterest Architecture Update - 18M Visitors, 10x Growth, 12 Employees, 410 TB

#43

Post by drumdance »

megaman821 wrote: post #20
raverbashing wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I wish it was that simple. You can't mix and match (you can theoretically ) Let's say you began with Django, right? Or there was something already ready in Django. And then you begin to see the warts. But ok, you keep churning along. And the more you churn the more of a specialist in the deficiencies of each technology you become. Like the fact that Django's ORM runs like a dog. Or see all the "we moved to MongoD…

Yes, but the Django ORM helped them launch faster. There is nothing wrong using it to start with and then writing your own SQL queries when you need to scale or even changing your data model to accommodate scaling.

My company is going through exactly this scenario right now. We launched on and use Rails for most stuff, but there are a couple of important cases where we have to do direct sql.

Though I've had to work around some of Rails defaults for my use cases, there is no doubt that without it we'd not have been able to launch and iterate so quickly.

Re: Pinterest Architecture Update - 18M Visitors, 10x Growth, 12 Employees, 410 TB

#44

Post by edwinnathaniel »

encoderer wrote: post #6
edwinnathaniel wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon my ignorance: what is interesting about Pinterest stack? I think by now most startups, YC or not, in Silicon Valley will pretty much have a similar setup: 1) Choose the main web-stack (Rails or Django) 2) Choose the API framework (node.js, or something else) 3) Memcached for caching (or some NoSQL) 4) A message queue (ZeroMQ, RabbitMQ, or something ...) 5) nginx, HAProxy, Varnish, (or similar technology) 6) Ha…

Not trying to be a nit-pick, but wanted to mention that ZeroMQ is not a message queue in the sense that RabbitMQ (and Kestrel, Beanstalkd, SQS, etc) is. It's a socket library that you'd use to implement those technologies. And while this is truly unimportant, my experience with bay area startup stacks is that Redis has very thoroughly supplanted Memcached for most use cases. Though most still have a memcached cluster…

Can you elaborate why Redis has supplanted Memcached? Is it because Redis occupies a space in between Memcached and MemcacheDB? (in the sense of Redis can be both in-memory and/or persisted on disk?)

(Not that I care about starting the holy war of X vs Y, just out of curiosity why)

You have a point regarding your last statement. Perhaps I've been here far too long to notice more of the 10% and less on the 90% :)

... which is true ... last I read someone is making almost $1M revenue developing Windows desktop app in 2012 and another company is making $60k/monthly revenue developing BB apps using in-apps Ads. I think I'm going to sign-off on HN and go to the other side... :D :D :D

Re: Pinterest Architecture Update - 18M Visitors, 10x Growth, 12 Employees, 410 TB

#45

Post by rayval »

edwinnathaniel wrote: post #36
whalesalad wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a kabillion factors to consider though. With that many users, yes the exact implementation matters less and the ancillary systems and how they interact are more critical. But, building the platform, being able to iterate quickly and deliver robust functionality along the way is important as well. Not that Ruby hasn't, but Django and Python have really proved their worth with some of the heavy hitters recently…

... and when we look at the um... "old" fart Java... their roster is even more impressive: LinkedIN, Google, NetFlix, Amazon. Just commenting ... :D

Regarding Google my understanding is that Java is only used in a few areas, and is far from the majority of their portfolio. Most their production systems are C++, while a lot of offline processing is Python. There is even a smattering of .NET (in Orkut). I think Java was used in Wave, but that is now defunct. Likely a few of these systems are being migrated to Go.

Likewise with Amazon. My understanding, from chatting with some Amazon engineers at a conference, is that they have a pretty heterogeneous portfolio, even including some Perl and Oracle PL/SQL.

Others who are better informed, please correct.

Re: Pinterest Architecture Update - 18M Visitors, 10x Growth, 12 Employees, 410 TB

#46

Post by aneth »

edwinnathaniel wrote: post #44
encoderer wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not trying to be a nit-pick, but wanted to mention that ZeroMQ is not a message queue in the sense that RabbitMQ (and Kestrel, Beanstalkd, SQS, etc) is. It's a socket library that you'd use to implement those technologies. And while this is truly unimportant, my experience with bay area startup stacks is that Redis has very thoroughly supplanted Memcached for most use cases. Though most still have a memcached cluster…

Can you elaborate why Redis has supplanted Memcached? Is it because Redis occupies a space in between Memcached and MemcacheDB? (in the sense of Redis can be both in-memory and/or persisted on disk?) (Not that I care about starting the holy war of X vs Y, just out of curiosity why) You have a point regarding your last statement. Perhaps I've been here far too long to notice more of the 10% and less on the 90% :) ...…

Redis is far more feature-ful, and can serve the purpose as memcache. Why have two parts when you only need one?

Redis offers persistence, set operations, namespacing, you can delete multiple entries with wildcards...

Re: Pinterest Architecture Update - 18M Visitors, 10x Growth, 12 Employees, 410 TB

#47

Post by cookiecaper »

megaman821 wrote: post #20
raverbashing wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I wish it was that simple. You can't mix and match (you can theoretically ) Let's say you began with Django, right? Or there was something already ready in Django. And then you begin to see the warts. But ok, you keep churning along. And the more you churn the more of a specialist in the deficiencies of each technology you become. Like the fact that Django's ORM runs like a dog. Or see all the "we moved to MongoD…

Yes, but the Django ORM helped them launch faster. There is nothing wrong using it to start with and then writing your own SQL queries when you need to scale or even changing your data model to accommodate scaling.

I hate the Django ORM and I don't know why Django doesn't just deprecate it and switch to SQLAlchemy as the new default, which is a much, much better ORM and used primarily by non-Django Python apps.

Re: Pinterest Architecture Update - 18M Visitors, 10x Growth, 12 Employees, 410 TB

#48

Post by teyc »

moe wrote: post #38
tnash wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah...that's insane. Since they're a "pre-revenue" company, they're just burning money.

"Burning" seems like an understatement. Looks like a switch to dedicated hardware would amortize within... 3 months.

Given their growth rates and cash in the bank, and the fact it is still looking for a business model, it is probably better for them to focus on their key problems before working on other issues. If they were self funded, like 37signals, and are running operations where they'd tighten the screws on cost, then the focus is different again.

Re: Pinterest Architecture Update - 18M Visitors, 10x Growth, 12 Employees, 410 TB

#49

Post by garindra »

swah wrote: post #39
edwinnathaniel wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pardon my ignorance: what is interesting about Pinterest stack? I think by now most startups, YC or not, in Silicon Valley will pretty much have a similar setup: 1) Choose the main web-stack (Rails or Django) 2) Choose the API framework (node.js, or something else) 3) Memcached for caching (or some NoSQL) 4) A message queue (ZeroMQ, RabbitMQ, or something ...) 5) nginx, HAProxy, Varnish, (or similar technology) 6) Ha…

I would think that Nginx + Django + SQL, and the rest is premature optization...

Even simpler : Django + SQL in Heroku.
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