Episode #79: What to do with your data in a serverless world with Angela Timofte

About Angela Timofte

Angela Timofte is the Tech Lead at Trustpilot, a global review platform that helps businesses collective and leverage customer reviews. Angela has a proven history of transitioning legacy applications to new platforms and product offerings. She is driven to build scalable solutions with the latest technologies while migrating away from monolithic solutions using serverless applications and event-driven architecture. She is a co-organizer of the Copenhagen AWS User Group and a frequent speaker about serverless technologies at AWS Summits, AWS Community Days, ServerlessDays, and more.

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/jHE0VYfQUaY

Transcript

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly and this is Serverless Chats. Today I'm speaking with Angela Timofte. Hey, Angela, thanks for joining me.

Angela: Hi, Jeremy. Thanks for having me here.

Jeremy: So, you are the Data Platform Manager at Trustpilot, so I would love it if you could tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and your background and what you do at Trustpilot and what Trustpilot is all about.

Angela: Yes, of course. So as you already mentioned, I work as a Data Platform Manager at Trustpilot and I've been with the company for almost six years. So, quite a long period of time for a company that it's only been for like 11 years on the market. But yeah, I started in the company as a backend developer and then moved to be more of a full stack developer and now the data platform manager because my love for data was always there and I kind of did everything that I could do to move closer to the data. To be honest. no matter where I was in my career it was always data that, like, attracted me the most. Like how do you handle it? And to be honest nowadays, like, data is everything. Like you can't make any decision as a business without data and now everyone is seeing that. So it's really cool the position I am in right now because I can push all these, like, these data meetings that we do so that we take, like, the right decision. And then, yeah, Trustpilot. I mean, hopefully everyone heard about Trustpilot. At least that's what I want to think, but in case you haven't, you should use it. It's an online review platform and I mean our all … our whole mission is to help people to have better experiences when it comes to purchasing online. But of course, at the same time, we want to help businesses to connect with their customers and also improve their offerings and for that we offer all these analytics tools. So they understand better their customers and they know where they need to improve their business. 

And I mean if you think about, like, the situation now with Covid, honestly Trustpilot came perfectly. Even for me, like, I'm talking from my perspective now, but, like, I had to order everything online, like, from food to, like, toilet paper. I didn't go to the store to fight for it. I went online and fight for it, and fought for it. So, but it came super handy because I'm based in Copenhagen and we don't have Amazon here and then you have to purchase from, like, small businesses and you don't know about all of them. So I had found myself searching on Trustpilot. Okay, can I trust this business because I've never heard about it, right? So I don't want to throw money out there. And yeah, that's what you can use Trustpilot for if you are a consumer, and especially in these times it's perfect because I can trust that what I find there it's real data and real people and I can get their opinions on all of these. So, yeah.

Jeremy: Awesome. So I am super excited to have you here because as much as I am a huge serverless geek, I love data; like, I'm with you on that. Like everything that I do, I'm always finding better ways to build or abstract data or interact with data. I built all these open source libraries, and I think all my open source libraries have something to do with data. And what we've seen over the last several years is this move to more and more serverless data, right. Like, capabilities that allow us to use databases that are more and more serverless, DynamoDB obviously being one of the big ones; all kinds of crazy stuff happening with relational databases.

So, you're an expert on databases and data and I would love to get some of your, you know, sort of your comments and insight on what are those choices that people have right now for serverless data. And also we're in the middle of re:Invent right now, so just in the beginning of re:Invent there's already a whole bunch of announcements of new things that Amazon has released and more options that are available. So let's start there. What are, you know, what are those serverless options for data that people have?

Angela: Yes, I mean you've already mentioned DynamoDB and for me that's like the first choice when it comes to building serverless applications, to be honest, especially when you think about scaling and that's my first pick and then Aurora and now we have Serverless 2 let's see what we can do with that one, right. Super excited to see more about the version 2 and then yeah you can use S3 Kinesis and they've released some other things now for databases like Babel Fish to, like, export the data up, and yeah. Then you had ... what was it called ... Glue as well …

Jeremy: Oh, yeah, Glue Elastic Views. Yeah.

Angela: Yes, which will actually replace some of the pipelines that I have probably with, like, cold DynamoDB streams going to Lambda then going to Elasticsearch, so probably that will change some of the things that I've done previously. But, yeah, when it comes to databases and serverless, I know like especially before, I don't know if it's still the case, but when people are mentioning serverless was always like Lambda functions, and containers, and things like that, but no one was talking about databases and I think it's a huge mistake because, I mean, no matter how scaleable you make, like, your services, if your database is not scalable, then, like, you're missing the point, right?

Jeremy: Right, right.

Angela: And yeah, and that's why I think it's super important to look at these serverless databases so that you make your entire pipeline scalable from one end to another. And that's where DynamoDB comes super-handy.

Jeremy: Right. So with DynamoDB, I think if people don't know what  DynamoDB is, just go and look it up. It is an amazing key-value store document database. You can do some really cool things with that. But it does have limitations in terms ... especially if you're building like OLAP applications, right? Because you can't do all these different queries. You can’t slice and dice the data different ways.

So, beyond DynamoDB being a very good sort of ... I look at it as a perfect application or a perfect database for your frontend users that need to access data quickly where the access patterns are very consistent and you know what those are going to be. But when y...