Episode #32: Customizing Serverless for Custom Ink with Ken Collins

About Ken Collins:

Ken is a Staff Engineer at Custom Ink focusing on DevOps & eCommerce architectures with an emphasis on emerging opportunities. Custom Ink is approaching its 20th year in business and is entering its second phase of Cloud adoption where he helps a growing engineering team succeed using AWS-first well-architected patterns. Ken lives near Norfolk, VA and organizes the area’s Ruby User Group.

Twitter: @metaskillsCustom Ink Tech on Twitter: @CustomInkTechBlog: technology.customink.comLamby: lamby.custominktech.comFull Stack to Functions and Back Again Talk:Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/metaskills/full-stack-to-functions-and-back-again?slide=2Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktDXVn3EPfY Migrate Your Rails App from Heroku to AWS Lambda: https://technology.customink.com/blog/2020/01/03/migrate-your-rails-app-from-heroku-to-aws-lambda/ActiveRecord Adapter for Amazon Aurora Serverless: https://github.com/customink/activerecord-aurora-serverless-adapter

Transcript:

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

Ken: Hi Jeremy. Thanks so much for inviting me.

Jeremy: You are a Staff Engineer at Custom Ink. Why don't you tell the listeners a bit about yourself and what Custom Ink does?

Ken: Yeah, I think maybe first I'd like to say thank you for inviting me to the podcast, really great to be here. I definitely would like to think that it's not because we both have 38-inch, identical Dell Curved Monitors. A very exclusive club.

Jeremy: It is an exclusive club.

Ken: Sure. Custom Ink, let's see. I'm a Staff Engineer, I focus mainly on the eCommerce side. Custom Ink is about 20 years in business. And, I think we're probably only unique in the fact that we're a successful company that has a long history with Rails.

 We've been going along for those 20 years, a lot of those years have been with Rails. And, we've sort of completed a lift and shift into the cloud since about 2017. And, we've had some interesting things to do with cloud adoption or adoption of serverless and all things basically AWS.

Jeremy: And, what about yourself? What's your background?

Ken: Well, let's see. I'm a self-taught programmer. Used to be a designer, used to be a marketing director. I think at one point in time I was the author for the act of record SQL server adapter. So, represented the Ruby community and Microsoft when they first started doing their transition to open-source.

And, I think I really love open-source. I'm focusing mainly on retooling my personal career and learning everything about AWS. And, that started about last year. And, doing everything I can at Custom Ink to sort of sell the serverless story, and to get more cloud adoption within the organization.

Jeremy: Very cool.

Ken: Thank you.

Jeremy: All right, so I wanted to have you on today because I've had a number of guests. And, we talk about serverless in theory all the time. And, we have all kinds of great ideas of architectures. And, I mean we get into some of the practical stuff. But, the hands on piece of it, and how companies like Custom Ink are actually getting their hands dirty. And, doing the work to figure out how to implement it. Every one of those stories is different, and I just really love the story that Custom Ink has. I think I saw a testimonial on the AWS site about sort of how you started with it.

I want to get into that because I think that's really interesting for people to hear how other companies get started with serverless and Lambda. And, how they start adding that. And again, you've gone through the experience of the lift and shift. I know you have some interesting microservices stories that I think would be great to hear about. But, let's start with that, let's just start ... you started moving to the cloud, you did the lift and shift thing. And, I'm assuming those were mostly monolithic applications, so what was the next step for Custom Ink?

Ken: Yeah, I think our story arc, maybe about 2014 was key sort of monolith. We had a very traditional big Rails frontend and a big Rails backend that sort of shielded us from a legacy Java backend. And, at that point in time, and we still didn't finish our cloud sort of migration until 2017. Which, is basically just a bunch of EC2 instances.

At some point in time in 2014, I think that's when Lambda came out. And, there was a lot of buzz around microservice architectures first. And, we even had a business unit that had started off in 2014. That we sort of gave them this majestic monolith, and the business unit decided to immediately retool that entire monolith into microservices first. It was just the hot thing to do in 2014.

Jeremy: Sure.

Ken: And, I believe that took about a couple of years to really fail miserably. In fact, everything that they went to engineer on, just breaking things apart. Eagerly because that was the architecture to do, versus the success of the company driving that microservice architecture all rolled back. All changed, eventually we got merged back into the core business line. And, that really sort of affected, I think a lot of the corporate memory about how we approached microservices.

Jeremy: Sure. Then after you sort of had this epic failure. And again, I think this is nothing against Custom Ink. Because, I think this happens to a lot of people, who try to do that second version syndrome and say, "we'll just take our existing application, break it up into smaller pieces and everything's going to be great." That typically doesn't work. Sometimes it does, but most of the time I don't think it does. Then you shifted to this idea of a kind of using Lambda functions and serverless in general really to start splitting off, you actually started more with DevOps tasks, right?

Ken: Yeah. I think there has always been a little bit of AWS Glue. I call it, when I look at Lambda I've sort of from my perspective today I put them into three buckets. AWS Glue is when you're just sort of glueing things together, maybe you're popping Kinesis Streams off of a DynamoDB. Or, you're just doing some little small tasks, maybe scheduling the shutdown of EC2 instances. Then there's the sort of microservice architecture of where I think a lot of people have their head space around Lambdas. And, then those are more sort of larger applications.

In, 2017 we had a brilliant engineer named Hunter. Who, took a key part of our design architecture and that really needed to come off of a Rails app, and ImageMagick. And, put it into a Node-based Lambda. And, that's what our customer testimonial on the Lambda product website is about. I think we had 90% in cost saving...