Infrastructure Advancements at AWS ReInvent 2024
Madhuri Racherla, VP, Engineering — Infra & SRE
At the recent AWS ReInvent 2024 conference, Madhuri Racherla, VP of Infrastructure & SRE, shared an inspiring story of the company’s ongoing journey to optimize performance and reduce costs. Her talk not only highlighted Pinterest’s strategic infrastructure advancements but also aimed to motivate engineers to pursue innovation and excellence.
A Vision of Boundless Creativity
Madhuri kicked off her presentation by painting a picture of a world where creativity knows no bounds. With Pinterest’s mission to inspire over 553 million monthly active users* to create lives they love, the platform isn’t just a hub for ideas; it’s a movement celebrating creativity and discovery.
Empowering Infrastructure on AWS
Madhuri spotlighted the powerful infrastructure underpinning Pinterest’s operations, which seamlessly serves a growing user base. Utilizing tens of thousands of EC2 instances and storing about an exabyte in Amazon S3, Pinterest ensures all user content is secure and accessible. This robust setup fosters rapid feature rollout and reliability.
To keep pace with Pinterest’s growth, infrastructure strategies have been refined for flexibility, reliability, and cost-effectiveness. Through strategic moves, Pinterest ensures scalability and keeps delivering top-notch user experiences.
The AMD M7a Integration
Pinterest’s adoption of AMD M7a instances with EPYC Genoa CPUs represents a significant leap in optimizing infrastructure efficiency. These instances strike an ideal balance with a 1:4 vCPU to memory ratio and physical x86 cores, enhancing compute-bound microservices performance. By shifting from c5.9xl to m7a.4xl instances, Pinterest leveraged improved hardware to align resources precisely with actual needs.
This transition not only increased performance but also yielded significant cost savings — up to 40% in some cases, and 20% over Graviton 3. The M7a instances epitomize Pinterest’s commitment to continual infrastructure innovation and scalability, demonstrating that efficient right-sizing translates into substantial operational value.
Migration Success and Strategy
Madhuri detailed the strategic steps taken to migrate, including workload analysis, instance selection, and comprehensive testing. The migration was completed swiftly, showing consistent CPU usage and performance, with no impact on service level objectives.
These enhancements highlight Pinterest’s dedication to boosting both performance and cost-efficiency, aligning infrastructure with current and future needs. By making strategic decisions today, Pinterest lays the groundwork for greater possibilities tomorrow.
Conclusion: A Call to Action
Madhuri’s presentation at AWS ReInvent was more than an update on Pinterest’s technical accomplishments — it was a call to push boundaries and make thoughtful, strategic choices. Her message aims to inspire all engineers in tech, to seize opportunities for innovation, reminding us that each smart decision today sets the stage for future successes.
*Pinterest internal data; Global analysis; Q3 2024
