Much like others in ecommerce, Lego sees extremely spikey traffic patterns, said Nicole Yip, engineering manager in direct shopper technology at The Lego Group. She discussed how the team behind Lego.com deals with sudden increases in demand for its services, usually tied to product launches and sales events that encourage throngs of customers to access the site at the same time. “Imagine trying to tackle all of that spikiness and year-on-year growth with an on-premise monolith tied to back-end systems with limited scale,” Yip said.
Sometimes such monoliths stumbles over themselves. In 2017, Lego faced a high-profile sales event, she said, for the Star Wars Millennium Falcon set -- the company’s biggest set to date. “On the launch day, we experienced a huge spike in traffic that resulted in our back-end services being overwhelmed,” Yip said. “All our customers could see was the maintenance page.”
Image: teracreonte - stock.Adobe.com
The culprit service that failed the hardest was a small piece of functionality that calculated sales tax, she said. It made a call back to the on-premise tax calculation system that quickly reached its limits. “At that point, we knew that we were on a trajectory for growth that could no longer be sustained with an on-premise system,” Yip said.
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https://www.informationweek.com/cloud/why-lego-went-cloud-and-serverless-to-handle-traffic-spikes/d/d-id/1339742
Much like others in ecommerce, Lego sees extremely spikey traffic patterns, said Nicole Yip, engineering manager in direct shopper technology at The Lego Group. She discussed how the team behind Lego.com deals with sudden increases in demand for its services, usually tied to product launches and sales events that encourage throngs of customers to access the site at the same time. “Imagine trying to tackle all of that spikiness and year-on-year growth with an on-premise monolith tied to back-end systems with limited scale,” Yip said.
Sometimes such monoliths stumbles over themselves. In 2017, Lego faced a high-profile sales event, she said, for the Star Wars Millennium Falcon set -- the company’s biggest set to date. “On the launch day, we experienced a huge spike in traffic that resulted in our back-end services being overwhelmed,” Yip said. “All our customers could see was the maintenance page.”
The culprit service that failed the hardest was a small piece of functionality that calculated sales tax, she said. It made a call back to the on-premise tax calculation system that quickly reached its limits. “At that point, we knew that we were on a trajectory for growth that could no longer be sustained with an on-premise system,” Yip said.