Securing Infrastructure at Scale: Introducing Pinterest’s Resource Provisioner Pipeline (RPP)

Ammar Ekbote | Senior Software Engineer
Chan Kim | Senior Software Engineer

Managing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) across a massive organization comes with a unique set of security and logistical challenges, particularly when operating within a distributed, multi-repository architecture. At Pinterest, we designed the Resource Provisioner Pipeline (RPP), our specialized, proprietary Terraform execution engine to safely manage both critical and non-critical infrastructure changes.

In this post, we will look under the hood of the first iteration of the RPP system. We will explore how it established compliance and provides robust security guardrails for our global AWS operations by utilizing dual controls, centralized GitHub Actions execution, and a secure role-chaining mechanism. If your engineering team is looking to add strict guardrails to a GitHub workflow-driven Terraform setup, our architecture might serve as a helpful blueprint.

What is RPP?