Activity 4: Lightweight Models and Cost Effective Scalability

Lightweight models and cost effective scalability is another O'Reilly pattern of web 2.0 applications. This is essentially the pattern of innovation in assembly for business models. It therefore involves getting products to market faster, reducing costs and risks, as well as encouraging simplicity within the application's assembly.

Pinterest

Pinterest is a service operating both web and mobile applications. It allows users pin images or videos to themed boards which they can share with friends or keep private. Users can also follow users or boards which interest them and like or share their content to their own boards.

Best Practices

The first best practice which Pinterest is implementing really effectively is outsourcing wherever practical or possible. The company has utilised Amazon Web Services, namely Amazon Simple Storage Service for its data storage and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud for its data analysis. This means that the company is not responsible for providing and caring for large data banks which it can use for storage and therefore can divert the resources, such as money and manpower, which it would have devoted to this to other areas of its operation.

Another best practice which Pinterest is performing particularly well in is that it has been designed for scaling. The application experienced rapid growth across a nine month period, going from 50 thousand users to 11 million. This could potentially have been disastrous if the application hadn't been designed in this manner, as the company by itself probably couldn't have kept up with the demand being placed on its servers, and therefore would have had constant outage problems, causing users to give up on their services and turn to others. However, it avoided this by scaling with demand. By outsourcing their data storage and processing to Amazon, they are can (and have) enabled autoscaling on their data storage and load balancing on their processing, allowing for them to have the optimum setup for their current data requirements.

Future

Obviously, Pinterest has a very bright future ahead of it should it continue to implement its strategies as well as it is now. It may begin to look into other areas of this web 2.0 pattern, such as outsourcing its own functionality and expertise to other services, or changing its revenue model, however it doesn't appear to need to make any major changes any time soon.

Do you know of any other companies which have a data strategy which is as light weight and cost effective as Pinterest? Tell me about it in the comments.