Pinterest encountered a significant performance issue during the migration of its search infrastructure, Manas, to Kubernetes, where one in a million search requests experienced latency spikes. The investigation revealed that cAdvisor’s memory monitoring processes were causing excessive contention, leading to these delays. The team resolved the issue by disabling a specific metric in cAdvisor, allowing them to continue their migration efforts without compromising performance.

Pinterest is transitioning from its aging Hadoop-based platform to a Kubernetes-based data processing solution named Moka, designed to address scalability and performance needs. The first part of this series discusses the rationale behind this shift, the architecture of the new platform, and initial design considerations, while outlining the benefits of using Kubernetes for data processing at massive scale.