Improving Sustainability and Price Performance Using AWS Graviton–Based Instances with Pinterest

Pinterest’s mission is to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love. This mission requires building handy applications that use artificial intelligence to retrieve information from a very large infrastructure. The company is always looking for ways to improve its overall return on investment (ROI) from this infrastructure while simultaneously achieving its sustainability goals, and it saw an opportunity to do so by adopting AWS Graviton.

“We look for scenarios where we can improve sustainability and ROI at the same time,” says David Chaiken, the chief architect of Pinterest. “We deeply appreciate the move by AWS to renewable energy, which helps us be more efficient and reduce the total energy that we’re using.”

Pinterest had already been using Amazon EC2 for almost 10 years when AWS announced AWS Graviton–based instances in 2019. The company evaluated how AWS Graviton–based instances could benefit its workloads and did ROI studies, which led to investment in a migration program in 2021. The first step in the process was to build a small, cross-functional team of domain experts to prepare its code base, and build and deploy systems for the change. The next step was to gain experience with product deployments and benchmark four public workloads in 2022. The migration ramped up with an engineering-wide program throughout 2023–2024, and by June 2024, the team migrated more than 25 percent of Pinterest’s compute infrastructure.

Working closely alongside the AWS team for many years, Pinterest has been able to accelerate the migration to AWS Graviton–based instances. Throughout the process, AWS experts provided guidance on AWS Graviton, including ROI and sustainability analysis through workload deployments. “Working alongside AWS, we aligned our sustainability goals with our business goals,” says Sierra Hutto, senior technical program manager at Pinterest, who drove the migration initiative.

As part of the migration, Pinterest identified an important workload and worked alongside the AWS team to benchmark the positive impact of AWS Graviton–based instances on improving workload efficiency. The workload consists of thousands of instances that serve Pinterest’s API, which is central to every aspect of Pinterest’s product and business. These instances respond to billions of API requests per day. For this workload, Pinterest found that the migration to AWS Graviton–based instances resulted in a 38 percent reduction in compute resources, 62 percent lower carbon emissions per API request, and 47 percent reduction in workload costs.

The results for this specific workload might not apply across all the migrated workloads, but Pinterest has realized a meaningful ROI and sustainability impact from the migration to AWS Graviton–based instances. “We don’t have to choose between business outcomes and sustainability goals, because using AWS Graviton, we can align, achieving cost efficiency while emitting less carbon,” says Chris Bunting, engineering manager at Pinterest, whose team runs Pinterest’s client APIs.

The work on migrating to AWS Graviton–based instances is one of Pinterest’s many cost-efficiency programs that align business with sustainability goals. This effort reduces overall resource consumption and is complemented by the transition to renewable energy. Using renewable energy is critical for Pinterest’s commitment to its emissions-reduction targets. “We’ve grown Pinterest's monthly active users to record highs, while continuing to make progress toward our sustainability goals,” says Mia Ketterling, senior corporate affairs lead for environmental sustainability at Pinterest. The company’s 2024 ESG Impact Report provides more information on its global work on sustainability.

Pinterest’s migration to AWS Graviton–based instances was part of a comprehensive program to modernize and rightsize the company’s compute infrastructure. A central component of the program’s success was including AWS Graviton in the set of approved instances—empowering the engineering team to continue to innovate while achieving bottom-line goals. “Our investment in AWS Graviton–based instances has paid off significantly,” says Madhuri Racherla, vice president of infrastructure engineering at Pinterest. Pinterest is now looking forward to further efficiency gains as additional workloads are deployed on AWS Graviton–based instances.

“When it comes to climate change, a lot of relatively small projects add up to a real difference,” says Chaiken. “Using AWS Graviton–based instances is one of those, and we’re proud of the work that we’ve done alongside the AWS team.”