Wayfair describes itself as the “the destination for all things home: helping everyone, anywhere create their feeling of home.” It provides an online platform to acquire home furniture, outdoor decor and other furnishings. It also supports its suppliers so they can use the platform to sell their home goods, explained Natali Vlatko, global lead, open source program office (OSPO) and senior software engineering manager, for Wayfair as the featured guest in Detroit during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022.
Wayfair describes itself as the “the destination for all things home: helping everyone, anywhere create their feeling of home.” It provides an online platform to acquire home furniture, outdoor decor and other furnishings. It also supports its suppliers so they can use the platform to sell their home goods, explained Natali Vlatko, global lead, open source program office (OSPO) and senior software engineering manager, for Wayfair as the featured guest in Detroit during KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022.
“It takes a lot of technical, technical work behind the scenes to kind of get that going,” Vlatko said. This is especially true as Wayfair scales its operations worldwide. The infrastructure must be highly distributed, relying on containerization, microservices, Kubernetes, and especially, open source to get the job done.
“We have technologists throughout the world, in North America and throughout Europe as well,” Vlatko said. “And we want to make sure that we are utilizing cloud native and open source, not just as technologies that fuel our business, but also as the ways that are great for us to work in now.”
Open source has served as a “great avenue” for creating and offering technical services, and to accomplish that, Vlatko amassed the requite tallent, she said. Vlatko was able to amass a small team of engineers to focus on platform work, advocacy, community management and internally on compliance with licenses.
About five years ago when Vlatko joined Wayfair, the company had yet to go “full tilt into going all cloud native,” Vlatko said. Wayfair had a hybrid mix of on-premise and cloud infrastructure. After decoupling from a monolith into a microservices architecture “that journey really began where we understood the really great benefits of microservices and got to a point where we thought, ‘okay, this hybrid model for us actually would benefit our microservices being fully in the cloud,” Vlatko said. In late 2020, Wayfair had made the decision to “get out of the data centers” and shift operations to the cloud, which was completed in October, Vlatko said.
The company culture is such that engineers have room to experiment without major fear of failure by doing a lot of development work in a sandbox environment. “We've been able to create production environments that are close to our production environments so that experimentation in sandboxes can occur. Folks can learn as they go without actually fearing failure or fearing a mistake,” Vlatko said. “So, I think experimentation is a really important aspect of our own learning and growth for cloud native. Also, coming to great events like KubeCon + CloudNativeCon and other events [has been helpful]. We're hearing from other companies who've done the same journey and process and are learning from the use cases.”
Colleen Coll 0:08
Welcome to this special edition as the new stack makers on the road. We're here in cube con North America and discussions from the show floor with technologists giving you their expertise and insights to help you with your everyday work. Pucon and cloud native con conference news gather adopters and technologists to further the education and advancement of Cloud Native Computing, vendor neutral events, Speaker domain experts, and key maintainers behind popular projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, envoy, core DNS container and more.
Bruce Gain 0:49
High speed Cameron gain still here in Detroit. And I will be very sad to leave Detroit tomorrow. And I'm here today with Natalie Ladd go. Oh, thank you. Nice. Asians. Okay, absolutely. Great. For once. Natalie is head of open source for Wayfair. And it before we start talking about this fascinating open source project, you guys have initiated, I was wondering if you could please describe what wafer does?
Natali Vlatko 1:26
Yeah, definitely. So Wayfair is an online platform for all things home, basically, anything that you want to get for your home in terms of furnishings, furniture, outdoor decor, and so on, especially if you're working from home, also a place that you can go to get their supplies, anything for the home, we've, we've there provides. But on top of that, we're also huge in helping out our suppliers to be able to use that platform to sell their home goods. Right. And it takes a lot of a lot of technical, technical work behind the scenes to kind of get that going. We are in five different countries at the moment. US, Canada, Germany, UK and Ireland. Yeah, we were we like to think of ourselves as a global business
Bruce Gain 2:05
highly distributed. Absolutely. And that obviously lends itself well to containerization, microservices, Kubernetes and open source
Natali Vlatko 2:16
Absolutely, for sure. I was open source is really global, truly, I think and global as a technology and like an overall expertise. We have technologists throughout the world, definitely in North America, throughout Europe as well. And we want to make sure that we are utilizing cloud native and open source, not just as technologies that fuel our business, but also as the ways that are great for us to work in now. Very much sometimes remote distributed environment.
Bruce Gain 2:42
Maybe we could go take a step back a little bit. And describe how did you become involved in open source? And what what is your, your digital journey for yourself? How did you become involved in in systems?
Natali Vlatko 2:55
Yeah, great question. I don't have a usual background. I was meant to be an archaeologist. When I was doing my studies. I studied Egyptology and archaeology. And then the Arab Spring occurred during my master's studies, and I wasn't able to with my university, go and be in the field and attending. And so in my spare time, as a hobby, I was building websites, I was, you know, doing a lot of HTML, CSS, doubling a bit of JavaScript, and so on. And it was something that I really liked doing. And I kind of had to think of a plan B in my career when archaeology for me didn't take off. So did a lot of freelance work, and ended up getting into technical writing. And that was something that led me down the path of wanting to get a lot more involved in open source. And so for Wayfair, it was very much the push of us wanting to be at Wayfair, known as a tech company. I mean, given that we're in the E commerce space, the best way to be known as a tech company is to create technical products. Open source is a really great avenue for that. And so I kind of basically said, you know, I think Wayfair with this is a really great capability that we can build, and I'm the right person to build it been doing open source a lot on the documentation side, I'd really like to push Wayfair to get involved in this. And was able to amass a small team of engineers where we focus on platform work, we focus on advocacy, and we focus a lot on internally compliance with licenses, and also community management as well. National.
Bruce Gain 4:07
Yeah, absolutely. And where were where are they in their digital journey when you came on board?
Natali Vlatko 4:12
Yeah. So five years ago, I joined Wayfair. It was definitely a little bit before our full tilt into going oh, cloud native, we would have had a hybrid approach at that point, some on prem and some in the cloud, that 20. I would say that a centralized decision for us to properly decouple from our monoliths into like a microservice architecture would have happened in 2018 2019. That journey really began where we understood the really great benefits of micro services to a point where we thought okay, this hybrid model for us is actually would benefit our micro services being fully in the cloud. And so making that move in late 2020, making that decision to get out of the data centers and go fully in we actually just recently achieved that this October with with our cloud provider.
Bruce Gain 4:55
Reservations. I'm one assume it wasn't very easy.
Natali Vlatko 4:59
But it's everything in the cloud native world is we do want to make sure there's just generally as like, technology practitioners, that you're trying to make it as easy as possible, or as you know, approachable and frictionless as possible. But no, it's it's really hard, especially as a business. Like we say, We've been around for 20 years this year, and coming from a place where we were very enterprise at first, and then you need to push into open source and cloud native. How do you make legacy data centers and legacy systems work in a cloud environment now? And how do you how do you upskill, the engineers that we need to actually take us to the cloud and actually then monitor and look after those services? Now, in that new space? Definitely not easy, but we were really, really proud of ourselves to achieve that push out into cloud and our growth and knowledge investments still continues today.
Bruce Gain 5:44
And what is the main challenge now?
Natali Vlatko 5:47
Yeah, great question. I would say it's, it's a few things definitely, like continued training and education. That's something that we want to do. And I've seen a few different ways. Firstly, obviously investing in training with donations like Linux Foundation, CNCF, that offer really great training programs. But on top of that, it's also a really great training facet for us has been being able to create sandboxes for engineers that are, especially without work with communities and you know, running Kubernetes. Now, we've been able to create production environments that are very diverse environments, sorry, that are very close to our production environments so that experimentation in sandboxes can occur, Okay, folks can learn as they go without actually fearing failure or feeling fearing a mistake. So I think experimentation is a really important aspect of our own learning and growth for cloud native. And also, you know, coming to like great events like cheap kind of cloud native con and other events in the in the ecosystem. We were hearing from other companies who've done the same journey and the same process and learning from the use cases in
Bruce Gain 6:41
the watching the talks. I've really loved one of these talks. Absolutely. And just even
Natali Vlatko 6:45
being like the hallway track, as we often say, is like so beneficial. Yeah. at conferences, speaking to other folks be like, Yeah, we moved to cloud in 2019, as well. Let's talk about that. That has been actually super beneficial for a lot of our teams. And, and I know we've got a team here, we've got a team here that is specifically really interested in Backstage because we've adopted backstage as part of the CN CF. It's a developer portal that allows our engineers I waited to see the all the services that they need to be able to own their own application, operationally, and so on without having to like let's say, fully rely on an infrastructure team. So being able to come to a conference like this and like learn directly from the folks who develop the portal that we rely on super beneficial. That's an open source project. It is and part of the CN CF as well. Yeah.
Bruce Gain 7:29
That's, that's the beauty of it, as well as not only running all these people, but all these several 100. Now open source projects, or cn CF projects that are open source, they're all here.
Natali Vlatko 7:41
Yeah, definitely. And I think talking to folks face to face is obviously really great. But what's also just as good is that a lot of these interactions may need to continue async online in the open source space through issues and prs. Because that's how open source runs. And that's also been something that is it's very clear, speaking to a lot of maintainers. Being a fellow maintainer myself in the community. Yeah, I was going to get into that. Yeah, it's been really beneficial to you know, you have these discussions, but we say, okay, let's actually make sure that we push this back into the async. Space online that other people can benefit from when we're talking about Yeah, and
Bruce Gain 8:14
I wouldn't assume that wayfarers culture, is advocates giving back to the community. Yes,
Natali Vlatko 8:21
definitely.
Bruce Gain 8:22
How does that work?
Natali Vlatko 8:24
Yeah, great question. So as a head of open source, we definitely put together like a lot of great information and documentation for our for our engineers, together with my team to allow them to understand what can we do to give back? I think a lot of companies are really good at consuming open source. But you know, the contribution back is a little harder. Yeah, and you maybe heard it in the keynote earlier in the week here at cube con, you know, what are the what are the one things that maintainers need in terms of being able to get support? Anytime, yeah, contribute time? Absolutely, absolutely. And so were investing in trying to give engineers time, time to learn so that they can actually contribute back and understand that, hey, we need this solution, or we need to solve a certain problem, we have this solution. But investing in open source means you don't need to build it ourselves, we save a bunch of time, because we wouldn't build it ourselves. And the thing that works for us might work for someone else. So we contribute that back upstream so that other folks can take advantage and actually our own use case grows and becomes more mature. So that's something that we are investing in internally at Wayfair, to educate a lot with great documentation, working one on one with engineers doing all like user research in terms of what would you need from our team to help facilitate your contributions to open source. And we've gotten great feedback internally about how we need a clearer idea of what licenses we can use. So we've created an allowed delight denialist. For that, we need greater we need we need a better way to frictionlessly be able to like join the GitHub organizations that we want to do or for a project. So we've created a complete self service workflow so we get out of the way of software engineers and let them do their job policy. Absolutely. Yeah. Policy is cut is actually also a really great one that we're currently at Wayfair looking into for the open source world Oh,
Bruce Gain 10:00
yeah, that's kinda I mean, while you're describing it, and I was thinking that you're implementing the policy right from the get go,
Natali Vlatko 10:04
yeah, definitely. And that's, that's really foundational, the team that I run the open source program office at Wayfair. We look after the how to open source, but we want to rely on our software engineers and the domains that they know best that they're the experts in to tell us what we should be open sourcing, what we should be adopting, and what we should be contributing to. At the same time, of course, we can tell people what to do, but we should walk the walk as well. And so in our own team, we do our own contributions to open source as well.
Bruce Gain 10:28
Excellent. And I'm thinking I get the impression that Wayfair fosters a sandbox culture, which I advocate. And how does that play out? On a day to day for these engineers? Are they do they have a car belongs to work on their favorite project, sandbox, sandbox project? Or how does that? How can they choose and decide? And yeah, and how is it quantified? Do they get a day to do that? And how does that work? Yeah, great
Natali Vlatko 10:53
question. It can be varied across teams, wafer, and I'd love to speak about the larger organization that I'm part of. So in our organization, we have what we call this idea of a free day, Friday or 20% time 20% of your time, you can actually use it to do kind of whatever you want in the vicinity of, hopefully, it's actually good for your job. And we want you to do experimentation, we want you to jump into open source, we want you to maybe read some really great docs or like play around with a possible new tool. And we've had a lot of really, really great innovation come out of those kinds of days, where we've been able to build really great products for our engineers at Wayfair. From the company when we have had time in our department to actually free reign experiment and sandbox, as you mentioned. And so with that, we've actually been able to really, really successfully push as part of our performance model at Wayfair, as a software engineer, that your contribution to open source is part of you showing great performance
Bruce Gain 11:39
as well are now what are some of your favorite or most interesting open source projects.
Natali Vlatko 11:43
I'm a little bit biased. Of course, with that, I'm the co chair of the special interest group for documentation for communities. So I have to a big shout out to those folks. They're also big favorite project of mine was a one called tremor. It's a project that was built at Wayfair. with rust, it's event based processing system for mission critical environments, deals with unstructured data in real time is really, really great for businesses like us that every minute counts when it comes to an outage or a failure. And we were really, really lucky to be able to work with the CN CF and donate that project to the CN CF. Now, we've been able to grow the contributor base, they're working in a project that has a language that's really exciting and fun in the ecosystem right now with rust, and being able to grow that capability of our reliance on such a project by donating it. So to speak to the Foundation Space.
Bruce Gain 12:27
How did that come about? What was the what was the genesis of it? Yeah, so
Natali Vlatko 12:30
basically, I think a lot of businesses or a lot of companies look at certain kind of issues that they're facing or problems and challenges. And I think maybe we've got this current solution, but it could always be better. And this was one of those things without application level metrics, who were thinking, you know, it couldn't be better, we could have real time data in our hands when we need to, so that outages are just not as another as hard on us. Or maybe like eventually teaming up with a lot of other really great cn CF projects that we're using actually make outages go down to zero. And so tremor came about as a as something that we were solving that we wanted to get better in the application metric space. And we were really lucky at Wayfair to be able to be given the kind of speaker freedom great word, to say, Hey, pick the tools that you need to actually solve this this problem for us. And we're looking for something that we want real time data highly available, scalable, reliable, and so right tool for the job, something really performant rust was something that the team chose to work with. They didn't know rust prior to this, they went ahead and went went to Luna, excellent when got into the community went and learned about rust so that they could actually build a tool that would be beneficial. And Wayfair was able to replace LogStash with trimmer. We replaced a bunch of coals that we had down to full we saved ourselves. Definitely I would say about at the start $40,000 a month. Wow. With that replacement. That's something that we thought, okay, someone else is going to benefit
Bruce Gain 13:50
not to mention the last time you would have otherwise might have have had you not put that into place example for downtime, for example.
Natali Vlatko 13:58
Absolutely, absolutely. And this is something where that has been so monumental. For us, it's something that we've been able to kind of grow in house. But at the same time, we wanted to make sure that we were emphasizing that we would build every solution ourselves, that's going to actually work the best. This was something that it was a problem space that we believed after doing a lot of research that we could find a better solution for. But sometimes that research leads you down another open source project that already exists. And so contributing back to that for our own use case is also something that we push a lot internally at Wayfarer as well. And so again, that 20% time that I mentioned, we want folks experimenting looking into new things that maybe could make what they're doing right now a bit
Bruce Gain 14:37
better. Good. I was wondering too, for as far as rust goes, I mean, they came in the Rust code. What What were they using before was there a predominant language they were using? Oh, so
Natali Vlatko 14:45
this is something that just a team we chose that specific language as a as the right tool for the job. But at Wayfarer, we have a few different languages that we use across our platform. We use Java, we use Python, a little bit of C sharp here and there. But we used to be a PHP shop and we've moved away from PHP as a faces of our language when we moved away from the monoliths,
Bruce Gain 15:02
so a lot of fun. Yeah, absolutely. This is B Cameron game. Signing off here at Detroit with Natalie's lab go from Wayfair. Thank you so much. It was great.
Colleen Coll 15:13
Cube con and cloud native con conferences, gather adopters and technologists to further the education and advancement of Cloud Native Computing, to vendor neutral events featured domain experts and key maintainers behind popular projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, envoy, core DNS, containers, and more.
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