Title

AWS re:Invent 2023 - Performance & efficiency at Pinterest: Optimizing the latest instances (COP352)

Summary

Ravi from Intel's Xeon software team and Ambu from Pinterest presented on cloud computing trends, focusing on cost, security, and development efficiency.
They emphasized the importance of software efficiency in the cloud to reduce costs, such as instance size and number of instances.
The talk highlighted the trend towards encryption for data in transit, at rest, and in use, and the impact on performance and necessity.
They discussed the balance between performance specialization and standardization, and the potential of common primitives for performance gains and cost reduction.
Pinterest's optimization process was detailed, which is ROI-driven and involves a four-step loop: hypothesizing, verifying, implementing, and validating.
Three use cases at Pinterest were presented, demonstrating hardware and software level optimizations: the data uploader service Merced, Apache Kafka, and the key-value store Rockstore.
The latest Intel instances (M7i, C7i, R7i) offer significant performance improvements, and the availability of performance counters in every instance size is a new feature.
Intel's contributions to AWS services and open-source projects were highlighted, showing the impact on performance and cost efficiency.
The talk concluded with a call to action for attendees to explore and apply the available optimizations and tools provided by Intel and AWS.

Cloud cost management remains a significant concern for organizations, and software efficiency is a key strategy for controlling costs.
Encryption is becoming increasingly important for security, but it can introduce performance overheads that need to be managed.
There is a tension between the need for performance specialization and the desire for standardization to move quickly in development.
Pinterest's iterative optimization process is a structured approach to improving performance and efficiency, which could serve as a best practice for other organizations.
The latest Intel instances provide substantial performance improvements, and the availability of performance counters in all sizes can facilitate better profiling and debugging.
Intel's extensive contributions to AWS services and open-source projects underscore the importance of collaboration between cloud service providers and hardware manufacturers for performance optimization.
The presentation suggests that there is a wealth of optimization opportunities that many organizations may not be fully utilizing, and there is a need for increased awareness and education on these topics.