Pinterest has introduced PinConsole, a unified internal developer platform(IDP) to centralize engineering workflows into a single interface. PinConsole was built to address the fragmented developer experience caused by multiple disconnected deployment, monitoring, and service management tools. By providing a consistent abstraction layer, PinConsole enables engineers to focus on business logic instead of navigating infrastructure complexity.
PinConsole integrates common developer workflows such as continuous deployment pipelines, monitoring dashboards, alerting, and ownership metadata. Engineers can use the console to manage releases, access logs and metrics, and investigate incidents without switching between separate tools. By providing a shared abstraction layer, Pinterest states that this helped to standardize engineering practices across teams and simplify the developer experience.
PinConsole is designed with an IDP model in mind, drawing inspiration from Backstage, Kubernetes, and gRPC. By providing a consistent interface and standard workflows, PinConsole promotes reuse and helps make engineering practices more uniform across different teams.
PinConsole unified developer platform(Source: Pinterest Engineering Blog)
To support this unified platform, Pinterest also built an entity data model that syncs every 60 minutes with its LDAP directory via Backstage’s ldapOrg provider. This ensures user and group information is always current, enabling accurate ownership tracking, team-based views, and fine-grained access control across the platform.
Under the hood, PinConsole uses PostgreSQL databases on AWS RDS for both production and staging. Pinconsole interface is customized with Pinterest’s Gestalt design system instead of Backstage’s default components. A core feature of PinConsole is the PinCompute plugin, which provides a unified interface for managing Kubernetes workloads. Pinterest’s PinCompute environment introduces custom resources such as PinApps and PinScalers, supported by a custom Kubernetes plugin. The platform also supports multi-tenancy, access control, and integrates with Pinterest’s security systems, service registry, and artifact repositories
PinCompute plugin internal (Source: Pinterest Engineering Blog)
Pinterest team detailed that, to ensure scalability optimizations were applied across multiple layers. Apollo Client’s cache policies proactively prefetch commonly accessed data, while React.lazy and Suspense enable code splitting. Critical pages are server-side rendered to improve time-to-first-meaningful-paint, and a multi-level caching strategy—covering CDN assets and API gateway responses—reduces latency and enhances perceived performance.
According to Pinterest engineers, PinConsole was designed to be extensible, allowing teams to contribute plugins and workflows that can be shared across the platform. This model enables deployment processes that were previously maintained separately to be standardized while still allowing customization. The engineering team noted that shared plugins also allow improvements from one team to be adopted more broadly across the organization.
Engineers at Pinterest highlighted that, since launch, PinConsole has reached over 700 daily active users, with around 30% of Pinterest engineers using the tool monthly. The team reported a Net Promoter Score above 70. Pinterest engineers also highlighted that consistent workflows, discoverable services, and extensible plugin architecture were key factors in the adoption of PinConsole.
