Insights Into LEGO's new serverless website architecture (InformationWeek Article)

[Phil B]

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.”

 

 

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.

[zaphoid]

The first step to fixing a problem is acknowledging that you have one.

[Bricklectic]

Sales tax, always causing problems.

[Shortbus311]

If only US retailers would follow suit with the rest of the world and build sales tax into the price of the products then they wouldn't have this issue.

[keymomachine]

1 hour ago, Shortbus311 said:

If only US retailers would follow suit with the rest of the world and build sales tax into the price of the products then they wouldn't have this issue.

How would that even work in the US when sales tax rates can vary from city to city and location isn't reported to the site accurately?

I actually noticed a shift in sales tax calculation on Lego Shop for my address started in August/September of this year. Interesting!

[Phil B]

2 minutes ago, keymomachine said:

How would that even work in the US when sales tax rates can vary from city to city and location isn't reported to the site accurately?

I actually noticed a shift in sales tax calculation on Lego Shop for my address started in August/September of this year. Interesting!

Interesting you bring this up. Cincinnati raised its Sales Tax from 7% to 7.8% recently, but my city (in the same county) still charges 7% (and 2 mile down the road I have 6.5% and 6.75% options as well in different counties/cities). Online retailers are all charging me 7.8% tax on my purchases right now. Do I have any means to claim back the (miniscule) 0.8% difference either right now or at tax time? Would anyone know?