Episode #82: Continuously Improving Serverless Standards at the LEGO Group with Nicole Yip
About Nicole Yip
Nicole Yip is an Engineering Manager at the LEGO Group. She has been working as an Infrastructure and DevOps engineer for over 5 years mostly as a consultant helping teams of all sizes get their services into AWS. Her roles have often become the catch-all for everything non-application-developer but that matches her passions for AWS, Infrastructure as Code, CI/CD, and Security. Nicole is a frequent speaker at various conferences, with past events including Serverless Architecture Conference, DevOps Con, and ServerlessDays Virtual.
Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/_09c6maJ3Uc
Transcript
Jeremy: Hi everyone, I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I'm chatting with Nicole Yip. Hey Nicole, thanks for joining me.
Nicole: Thanks for having me.
Jeremy: So you are an Engineering Manager at the LEGO Group, so I'd love it if you could tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and your background and what you do at the LEGO Group.
Nicole: Sure, so as you said, I'm an Engineering Manager. I have joined the company about a year and a half ago, as a Senior Infrastructure Engineer and then moved up to Engineering Manager and I've joined in the Direct Shopper Technology Team. So we look after www.lego.com, all of the pages where you're browsing for products, completing your order through checkout, and redeeming VIP vouchers, that's what my team looks after. And specifically, I look after the platform. So I head up the platform squad there where we look after the infrastructure and hosting and developer experience CI/CD, security, and operations of the site. So quite a big remit there and specifically my background as in AWS and managing production workloads and that's really where my interest is and what I'm doing at the LEGO Group.
Jeremy: Awesome, well so I am super excited that you are here because I love the LEGO Group, not just because I loved LEGOs as a kid, but also because I started talking with Sheen Brisals a long, long time ago and he was so super excited about the whole serverless process and just building things with serverless. And so it was really interesting to hear the process that the LEGO Group has gone through. And it's been, I think over a year since I talked to him on the show here. And so I'd love to set the stage here because there is this talk that you gave at ServerlessDays Virtual recently about this audit process that you do at the LEGO Group in order to make sure that you're following best practices with serverless and that you're always kind of upgrading. And I wanna get into that but I think to set the stage for everybody to know just how serverless the LEGO Group is, maybe you could give us just a quick timeline of where it started and where you are now from a serverless perspective in your engineering group.
Nicole: Yeah sure. So the story starts a little bit before I joined back in 2017 when we had, it was kind of an event that was the last straw, the straw that broke the camel's back, so they say. And yeah, so there was a launch event that was highly anticipated, we didn't survive. And that led to us looking at options that weren't on-premise, that weren't hosted on-premise. So we started back in 2018, actually scoping out serverless and AWS and seeing if it would work for us. So we migrated a single user-facing service and a couple of backend services over to the cloud, got them running and they were handling high season traffic by the end of 2018. And so yeah, fully in production and ready to go. And that then led on to us making the entire lego.com site serverless. So the pages that I mentioned that are within our team's remit, we moved all of them into Fargate instances and serverless Lambda functions. And so the only on-premise system we have is our source of truth, our warehousing system and we've wrapped that up in Lambda functions so we only talk to that asynchronously.
Jeremy: Nice, so now where are you now? You've mentioned Fargate, you've grown the number of engineers that are working in serverless, so like where are your just rough numbers, like how many Lambda functions do you have? Things like that.
Nicole: Oh, this is fun. So we had four Lambda functions in 2018 during Black Friday, Cyber Monday. In 2019, which was last year, we had just gone fully serverless. The platform was handling high season levels of traffic and at that point we had four Fargate instances and I think it was 36 serverless services. And a serverless service can be made up of many Lambda functions. I think we had around 150 to 200 Lambda functions. No, I think it was around 150 Lambda functions in production at that time. And now that we've gone through another Black Friday, Cyber Monday high season period, we're now over 260 Lambda functions in production with over 56 serverless services and still the same original four Fargate services. So we're growing pretty quickly.
Jeremy: I would say. So going back to the engineers 'cause this is another thing that fascinates me is how different companies group engineers together to manage different services and to make sure that, you know again, everyone's sharing information across teams and so that everyone's working together. And you mentioned you're on the platform squad so you are broken into squads. 'Cause I find it fascinating but I think the listeners might be interested in, how are those squads set up? What's the makeup of them? Like what are the disciplines that are there? You know just how does that work?
Nicole: Yeah so within the Direct Shopper Technology Team we have seven different squads right now. But back when we went serverless, we had two squads. We had a back end and a front end focus squad. So we largely had Lambda focused and serverless focused engineers in one squad and React, Fargate, Express, and Apollo engineers in the front end focus squad. And then once we launched the platform live we reorganized all of the squads into being product-focused. So they split up into five different squads each focused on different areas of the site. So that was one squad for checkout, one squad for VIP rewards, one squad for just exploration and how you discover products, and so on. And these squads are as full stack as we can get them at the moment. So the application engineers, QA engineers, the product owners, and now we're including stakeholders in there as well.
So people from other teams that are actually setting these requirements, these business requirements. So we've got quite a few people in each of those squads but we still have an essential platform squad. And the reason for that is it's a brand new platform that literally was written and launched like a year and a couple months ago. So we're still in that pattern of having a dedicated operations or platform squad but we're actively trying to move away from that. We're trying to train up each of those application engineers in the product squads to become operations focused, to have that mindset ...
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