In early 2017, Pinterest began moving its workload from EC2 instances to Docker containers with the goals of improving developer velocity, increasing reliability through immutable infrastructure, simplifying upgrades, and improving overall efficiency.

A single AMI (Amazon Machine Image) houses all container services, and all service-specific dependencies are put into this container.

Developers use Pinterest’s open-source tool Teletraan to launch containers, and the Docker container engine acts as the process manager to monitor and restart containers.