Pinterest's revelation to startups: DevOps model is crucial to rapid business growth

Pinterest is an American visual social networking site known as a "personal cool hunting tool". Founded in 2011, the site's user growth rate has caught up with Facebook's five years ago. It is another website that has attracted worldwide attention after Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. According to recent research data from marketing service company Experian, Pinterest's weekly visits in the United States reached 28.95 million in July, while last year's total visits were only 1.27 million, and the total number of visits has increased by 5124%. Judging from the data alone, Pinterest has a lot of experience in how to achieve rapid business growth.

What is the real reason behind Pinterest's explosive growth? Ryan Park, the company's operations engineer, revealed the answer to us. In his opinion, the DevOps model played a very important role in Pinterest's explosive growth.

So what does DevOps mentioned by Ryan Park mean? In the traditional workflow, there are many communication misalignments between development and operation and maintenance, which cause deployment problems. As a result, the concept of DevOps came into being. DevOps is a combination of "development" and "operation". It is a general term for a set of processes, methods and systems that are used to promote communication, collaboration and integration between development (application/software engineering), technical operations and quality assurance (QA) departments. Its emergence is due to the software industry's increasingly clear understanding that in order to deliver software products and services on time, development and operations must work closely together.

The biggest benefit of the DevOps model is that it can deliver the required software features faster and more efficiently. It can update the software faster and make necessary modifications to improve the end-user experience. Although the DevOps model is powerful, it is not easy to implement. Park said that it is a difficult process to master configuration tools such as Puppet from Puppet Labs and Chef from Opscode, but because this new business model is very efficient, many companies are still willing to try them.

So how can companies reduce the pain of transformation and create durable and reliable business processes as they transition to DevOps? Here’s what Ryan Park has to say:

1. Embrace Automation

Ryan Park said that you need to carefully compare the existing automation tools and then choose one that suits you. Pinterest uses the Puppet configuration management tool, which can automate the process of launching new servers and, most importantly, automatically configure the correct parameters.

Park said, "In the past, it was necessary to manually configure the parameters of many integrated services. Parameter tracking, checking what each server did, and adding new user data all required manual operation. Manual operation not only made the staff miserable, but also had low reliability. Generally, only 91 out of 100 servers could operate normally. The automatic tool can solve this problem very well."

2. Create a single source of truth

Although it is not easy to do this, by using the Puppet or Chef control panel, we can clearly know which systems are running on local servers and which are running on Amazon's EC2 cloud service.

“It’s important to get in the habit of building a trusted source,” Park said. “The system needs to know the names of all the servers and understand which servers are doing distributed caching and which are running other services. But you also have to enter the necessary data to bring all the important information together.”

3. Try to avoid cultural conflicts.

Developers and operations staff think and work in very different ways, mainly because their goals often conflict. On the one hand, developers want to deploy the coolest products as quickly as possible, while on the other hand, operations staff need to ensure that the running systems can run normally. If you can hire software engineers who understand operations or professional operations staff who understand development, it will be very helpful to the company's business. Of course, the premise is that both teams need to be aligned with the company's business goals.

4. Make preparations in advance.

For companies that already have large development and operations teams, there are always many problems in how to make the two sides work better together. When a startup is first established, because of its small scale, there is no such problem. However, as the scale grows, it becomes particularly important to rationally formulate workflows and choose appropriate technologies. Park said that if you are fully prepared in advance, the transition will be smoother.

5. Get involved in the community

There are a lot of DevOps professionals out there in a variety of communities, so take advantage of that. Subscribe to the appropriate mailing lists and attend meetups and vendor conferences, such as the upcoming Puppet Conference later this month, to expand your network and connect with a large number of professionals.

via: Leifeng.com