Pinterest Cut Costs from $54 to $20 Per Hour With Automatic Shutdowns
I'm Ryan Park -- I'm the Pinterest engineer quoted in the article. I'm happy to answer any questions about our setup.<p>Just to clarify, the auto-scaling was specifically for a pool of web application servers. At the time I gathered the numbers, there were 80 servers in that pool. In the last few months we've been moving toward a service-oriented architecture, and we've been able to use the same code to auto-scale the internal services. Of course it's not possible to auto-scale stateful servers like databases, but it's still saving us a considerable amount of money.<p>We implemented the auto-scaling in early 2012, so it's been in use for almost a year now. It only took about 2 weeks of engineering to build the system. It does need occasional maintenance, but it's still worth the effort given how much money it saves us.