Luke
☁️ Cloud Native 🌈 DevOps ⚡️ Serverless ⌨️ Node.js
Pioneering Serverless Payments at The LEGO Group
Luke Hedger
The LEGO Group
Brick by Brick - Aug 2022
René Magritte
Pioneer of Surrealism
René Magritte challenges us to use ordinary objects in unusual contexts
This is not a pipe
This is not a server
Pioneering Serverless
Payments
September 2018
Brickoin
LEGO.com
Brickbank
20+ Microservices
80+ Lambda functions
100+ GB in DynamoDB
10+ Step Functions workflows
40+ EventBridge rules
Payments platform
Contain complexity
Image from cockroachlabs.com
async
processes
365+ days
shoppers
Scale, scale, scale
Image from leanovia.com
May 4th
What happens after the serverless launch, after the pioneering?
How does mature serverless app stay modern?
Post-Pioneer
Growing up
- Different challenges today vs start
- Stability vs speed
- Serverless has changed
- Architecture and operations may not scale
The tradeoff
DELIVERY SPEED
APP STABILITY
Decisions
| Serverless Things | Start → Scale |
|---|---|
| Delivery pipelines | Start with one, scale to many. Move focus from implementation to delivery |
| Separate concerns | Start with few, scale to many. Collect domain knowledge, avoid wrong abstraction |
| 3rd party tools | Didn't exist (EventBridge) or unproven (CDK). Evolvable architecture |
| Emerging standards | Serverless matures, community grows, discussion amplifies |
| Test strategy | Stability > speed → stability == speed |
| Observability | Unknowns decrease over time |
Finding balance
DELIVERY SPEED
APP STABILITY
Serverless stability is often compromised by complex events
Stability
Plastic events
Consolidate events
Share events cross-application
Standard events
Secure events
Ship!
We need to observe production behaviour ASAP when using managed services
Continuous Serverless Delivery
Serverless SDLC
- Solution design - architecture, service limits
- Targeted refactoring, strangler pattern
- Optimise for test confidence, not coverage
- Isolated service deployments
- Use alarms!
Design → Develop → Test → Release → Observe
∞
Speed up tests by reducing coverage
Serverless Square of Balance
Designing a test strategy allows us to ship at a sustainable rate as our codebase grows
Serverless Test Strategy
Serverless Test Strategy
❌ Test everything all the time
❌ Long-running tests
❌ Too-good tests
❌ Ignore failures/hit retry and 🤞
Identify critical paths ✅
Test against the cloud ✅
Test integration points/event sources ✅
Blend with observability ✅
Until next time...
Work in progress
- Fault tolerance - idempotency
- Observability - less logs, more metrics
- Still learning, still discussing
- More from me twitter.com/level_out
- These slides 🤳👇
Thanks!
Pioneering Serverless Payments at The LEGO Group
By Luke
Pioneering Serverless Payments at The LEGO Group
The LEGO Group was a super early adopter of the serverless mindset and associated technology. It is time to review how one of its core products continues to operate and innovate 3 years on. We will take a look at the serverless, event-driven architecture powering The LEGO Group's payments platform, Brickbank, and how it facilitates e-commerce on a global scale. We'll explore the full software delivery lifecycle of the payments platform, including development, testing, release and observability. We will look at some of the key AWS services that play crucial roles in the platform's architecture, including Lambda, Step Functions, DynamoDB, EventBridge, CDK and Macie. We will also assess how a mature serverless application remains up-to-date with constantly evolving best practices, industry trends and feature requests.
