MySQL High Availability, 2nd Edition

Foreword for the Second Edition

Yashwanth Nelapati

Pinterest

Marty Weiner

Pinterest

In 2011, Pinterest started growing. Some say we grew faster than any other startup to date. In the earliest days, we were up against a new scalability bottleneck every day that could slow down the site or bring it down altogether. We remember having our laptops with us everywhere. We slept with them, we ate with them, we went on vacation with them. We even named them. We have the sound of the SMS outage alerts imprinted in our brains.

When the infrastructure is constantly being pushed to its limits, you can’t help but wish for an easy way out. During our growth, we tried no less than five well-known database technologies that claimed to solve all our problems, but each failed catastrophically. Except MySQL. The time came around September 2011 to throw all the cards in the air and let them resettle. We re-architected everything around MySQL, Memcache, and Redis with just three engineers.

MySQL? Why MySQL? We laid out our biggest concerns with any technology and started asking the same questions for each. Here’s how MySQL shaped up:

• Does it address our storage needs? Yes, we needed mappings, indexes, sorting, and blob storage, all available in MySQL.

• Is it commonly used? Can you hire somebody for it? MySQL is one of the most common database choices in production today. It’s so easy to hire people who have used MySQL that we could walk outside in Palo Alto and yell out for a MySQL engineer and a few would come ...