Last year, we were able to share why we have selected Airflow to be our next generation workflow system. This year, we will dive into the journey of migrating over 3000+ workflows and 45000+ tasks to Airflow. We will discuss the infrastructure additions to support such loads, the partitioning and prioritization of different workflow tiers defined in house, the migration tooling we built to get users to onboard, the translation layers between our old DSLs and the new, our internal k8s executor to leverage Pinterest’s kubernetes fleet, and more. We want to share the challenges both technically and usability wise to get such large migrations over the course of a year, and how we overcame it to successfully migrate 100% of the workflows to our inhouse workflow platform branded Spinner.

The two most common user questions at Pinterest are: 1) why is my workflow running so long? 2) why did my workflow fail - is it my issue, or a platform issue? As with any big data organization, the workflow platform is just the orchestrator but the “real” work is done on another layer, managed by another platform. There can be plenty of these, and the challenges of figuring out the root cause of an issue can be mundane and time consuming. At Pinterest, we set out to provide additional tooling in our Airflow webserver to make it a quicker inspection process and provide smart tips such as increased runtime analysis, bottleneck identifying, rca, and an easy way for backfilling. We explore deeper the tooling provided to reduce the admin load, and empower our users.