Inside Pinterest data centre

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Inside Pinterest data centre

8 billion objects stored, and running on Amazon cloud

Leosghost

12:11 am on May 1, 2012 (gmt 0)

Pinterest had 17.8 million monthly unique visitors as February came to a close

Among other things, the Pinterest pinboard uses Amazon's S3 object storage to keep the photos and videos that its millions of users have uploaded. Between August last year and February this year, Pinterest has grown its capacity on S3 by a factor of 10, and server capacity on the EC2 compute cloud is up by nearly a factor of three, according to Park, from about 75,000 instance-hours to around 220,000

[theregister.co.uk...]

The hourly costs are surprisingly , IMO, small ..they were $52.00 per hour to $15.00 per hour, and with ELB watched over by their own service, they have reached "max" hourly cost of $35.00 per hour..which at 17 million visitors per month is "interesting"..

DeeCee

12:23 am on May 1, 2012 (gmt 0)

"8 billion objects stored"...

One might wonder which percentage of those objects are actually legal, and which percentage represents stolen property.

Leosghost

12:33 am on May 1, 2012 (gmt 0)

Agreed..and as someone whose primary way to make a living for over 4 decades has been the creation of Images and objects and designs ..having read all your posts, I'm in almost total agreement with them.. ( the divergences would be so minor that for the moment I can't recall them :-)..The numbers, and the comparatively low monthly server cost as it says in the article , booked as "ongoing costs", caught my eye..

Some interesting ideas in the comments section there at "el reg" about how Pinterest could move to being legit..

But I wonder if the fact that they haven't invested in their own "iron" and DC, may be that if they hit a legal wall , they could keep the data on their "members" to exploit or sell on..and not have to cope with the "well what do we do with this expensive data centre" now scenario..

helleborine

12:37 am on May 1, 2012 (gmt 0)

Pfffft

I think about 15% of this is my content, haha.

BillyS

1:10 am on May 1, 2012 (gmt 0)

Leosghost - I think the $35 is an average, they hit a peak of $52, which is still quite amazing. WIth roughly 720 hours in a month, that works out to around $25K per month for hosting. Not bad...

This is mind blowing:

The S3 file storage currently has 8 billion objects in it, which weigh in at 410TB.

Amazon is quite the monster.

Leosghost

1:44 am on May 1, 2012 (gmt 0)

I was surprised that the TB figure wasn't higher, between HDs ( 25TB ) and DVDs, BRs and CDs ( about another 25TB ) I'm at one eighth of that..( less than .25 of a cubic metre of storage space, and most of that would be my optical discs, else my 50TB would all fit in a small laptop bag )..'course most of my access times are crap by comparison with theirs..;-)

But I don't have any of hellborine's stuff..,( I'm not making light of that..no doubt some of my stuff is also on there..sometimes you have to smile or cry..smiling is better for you :) ..Pinterest is like a rainstorm ..it will be over, eventually..meanwhile use an umbrella, and look to see what use you can put the water too..if any..

The hosting financials definitely demonstrate that unthought of players and models actually don't have a very high entry barrier to begin playing, many of the "backers" are betting on "something being viable/ exploitable with all that data", and if it isn't..they can lose sums which to many of them would not be any big deal..Particularly if they can continue to ( in the case of Pinterest* ) push the copyright problems on to their users / facilitators..

*youtube "bodyswerve" the same problem, and pass the ball / buck in basically the same way to their users / facilitators..