Episode #82: Continuously Improving Serverless Standards at the LEGO Group with Nicole Yip

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Pelicanpie88

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicole-yip-5b792292/

Medium: https://medium.com/lego-engineering

LEGO: https://lego.com

ServerlessDays Virtual 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oYS_5eL610

Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/_09c6maJ3UcTranscriptJeremy: 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 serverle