Episode #20: The Serverless Journey of LEGO.com with Sheen Brisals

About Sheen Brisals

Sheen is an experienced software engineer, solutions architect and a team coach, currently at LEGO architecting serverless solutions. Previously as a principal engineer, tech lead and development manager with leading organizations such as Oracle Corporation, Hewlett-Packard, Omron, TATA, BAe and others. Sheen is a regular speaker at tech gatherings. He is a keen participant at Serverless meetups, AWS conferences, Serverless Days and others.

Transcript

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and you're listening to Serverless Chats. This week I'm chatting with Sheen Brisals. Hi Sheen. Thanks for joining me.

Sheen: Hey, Jeremy. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jeremy: So you are a Senior Application Engineer at the Lego Group. So why don't you tell the listeners a bit about yourself and what you do at Lego.

Sheen: Right. So, yes, I am a Senior Engineer at Lego. I joined Lego three years ago. And as part of my role with Lego, I I act as a team lead; I act as an architect and also I coach fellow engineers on their career progression. So in terms of my career, I started way back in the nineties as a software engineer. I’ve been through quite a few organizations - both big and small - been involved with number off software development projects all the way through. So I joined Lego at a juncture where when they were thinking of moving to microservices so that's why I came on board with Lego, around three, three and a half years ago.

Jeremy: Awesome. Alright, so you are like jet-setting around the world telling the story of how Lego.com went serverless and I've seen you speak at a number of conferences and I think it's a huge service that you are doing for the serverless community sharing this because it is important, I think, for teams to see how other companies are doing it and how other people are implementing these things because it's very new. Serverless is very new, and even though it's been around for five years at this point, there are still a lot — there’s a long way to go. So I want to talk to you about this idea of the serverless journey at Lego.com. So let's start sort of where are you now? Where is Lego now with serverless?

Sheen: So within Lego, there are different teams or departments embracing serverless. So I am with the team that focuses on shopper technology, shopper engagement technology, that includes Lego’s ecommerce platform and all the toolings around that. So we are progressing well with the serverless approach, so as you know that we migrated the ecommerce platform onto serverless. So we didn't stop here, but our journey continues beyond that because now there are new issues, new developments coming up because we see the benefit of serverless that gives in terms of the speed or the, you know, velocity with which we can bring out new features to customers.

Jeremy: Great. Alright, so let's go back to the beginning, because this is one of those interesting things where I think companies get to this point where they're either starting their cloud adoption or they're running on legacy hardware, and they say, “Okay, we need to now make this move.” And a lot of people go down that container route, but it was a little bit different, so let's start with where you guys were. Where were you a couple of years ago when you came in there? What was the technology?

Sheen: So that time, all on-prem. And so we had Oracle ATG, an old version of Oracle ATG ecommerce platform hosted on-prem and we had an Oracle database talking to, the platform itself talking to a bunch of other services within Lego. And at some point, there was an initiative that happened to make it more API-based and even that time they first APIs around. But still, it was on-prem and a monolith, but the front-end moved on from being a JSP onto a JavaScript based, hosted on Elastic Beanstalk from AWS. That's pretty much what we had two years ago out in that time frame. So we had, you know, they did a number of issues associated with the typical monolith platform maintaining or releasing our new features and fixes and things like that. So that was pretty much the landscape we had at that time.

Jeremy: And then you had sort of a “come to Jesus” moment on Black Friday, right?

Sheen: Yes. So yes. So there are different things. So though I focus on that particular incident, there were one or two other thoughts that were going on. So, first one is the ecommerce platform itself was aging and very old. So we had to move on and then Lego, as a company, wanted to reach out to many children around the world. So that means they need the platform to go out and launch the shop and the availability of the bricks and everything to children around the world. So that was — from the business side of things — that was a need. So we need a platform that can provide us that capability. At the same time, we wanted to migrate from the old platform, so we were not thinking of serverless. So a typical microservice, put everything in a Docker, or, you know, containerize an instance-base — those were the different ideas floating around. Then came this Black Friday. And we had this catastrophic failure of the platform so that triggered some of the conversations internally to get to a point that we must break up things. We can't have everything together as a one-piece. So we wanted to make sure that, you know, we don't fail just like that. If something fails there are stuff the platform should be able to carry on. That's where things got ignited I would say and started the business and the engineering teams started to discuss and come up with proposals and ideas. So serverless was very much new at that time, and no one had any experience or exposure within the team I belonged. So I went out to office while looking at AWS and I'm talking to people, attending different conferences and meet-ups and things like that to gather the idea. Still, not to say where to take the leap to. So that was, at that time, when we had that Black Friday failure. So from then on, based on the technology improvements and the Cloud initiate deals and the organization-wide that the need for our digital transformation initiate too. So all those things came together for us to, you know, take on this serverless journey.

Jeremy: Did you already decide to move to the cloud? Like, basically, you said on-prem is not working for us or we need to be able to scale more. So you decided to move to the cloud and you said you looked at containers. But what was the thing about serverless though, that you said no, we definitely have to go this route?

Sheen: Okay, so there was another factor. So as part of the platform migration or the upgrades, there were a bunch of things that were looked at so either have a platform similar to what we had and everything available within a part of the platform or go the other way around. Look for simple, headless, API-based platform and then we can put our logic around it so we have the freedom to innovate, scale, bring in new features and the all other capabilities from our side. So that was kind of the discussion point. Then he chose that, okay, we need the flexibility because we don't want to be constrained by some of the commerce platforms out there. So we wanted the freedom to innovate, freedom to bring on the features the way that we wanted to bring out to the customers. That was a main shift. That's when we started looking at cloud as a, well, you know, ...