Zen is a storage service built at Pinterest that offers a graph data model on top of HBase and potentially other storage backends. Zen was originally conceived and built in summer 2013 and since then, has grown to be one of the our most widely used storage solutions, powering the home feed, interest graph, notifications, conversation and a number of other key features.

 In this talk, we'll go over the design motivation for Zen and describe its internals including the API, type system and HBase backend. We will also talk about our learnings from running the system in production for the last year, and features added and performance improvements made to accommodate the fast adoption we have seen since launch.