hello and welcome to this cube conversation this is part of our continuing coverage of kubecon cloud nativecon north america 2021 i have a very special guest with us uh from a technology company that on any given day at any given moment has any number of 31 million discrete users coming in looking for a specific item or two out of 22 23 24 million who knows how many items that could be shipped from 15 16 17 000 different locations around the globe and we've got one of the key folks responsible for managing what some of us in tech would refer to by the technical term a nightmare uh gary white from wayfair welcome hey thanks for having me yeah so tell us about wayfair what is wayfair we're all going to pretend like none of us have heard of wayfair before despite billions of dollars in advertising what is wayfair what do you get what do you what do you guys do before we get into the technology and how it actually works yeah uh that's a great question wayfair it uh exists to be the destination for all things home helping everybody and create a feeling of being at home uh so that's like our primary goal from the um overall business objective specifically in the technology uh part of the company we strive to make development of tools that make the shopping process easier uh carrying one of the widest like spaces of items means that we have to have incredible resiliency in our data and access to that data and then we try to build world-class development tools to compete with uh talent market um that is some of the biggest firms in the world okay so so just so we're clear because i want to make sure you came to the right to the right place this isn't furniture con this is cloud native con and you're not an you're not an artisan crafter of bespoke end tables right so you you craft a very different thing which is the uh which is the technical infrastructure behind this tell us about your relationship with uh with cloud native technologies in the open source world oh sure absolutely so my experience at wayfair has mostly consisted of um exposing the release engineering process and making the process of developing tools easier i think most companies invest about or a lot of companies invest a significant amount of their engineering talent into being able to create a platform for their developers to work on top of uh that's the team that i'm a part of where we create a platform for our developers and a large part of how we do that is leveraging technology that comes out of the cncf so we'll be talking about uh automation tools um things that you may run in kubernetes to do batch jobs things that you may run in kubernetes to run uh regular microservices and applications and then ways to automate the building of those applications and the packaging of it so that it can ship to production reliably and so you guys you guys aren't just you know when we go back several decades there were customers and there were vendors and those lines are really blurred in the open source community they have been for a long time but i mean you're you're actually working not only to develop solutions for wayfarer but you're working hand in hand with other people to develop solutions that get propagated across industry tell us about some of those projects that that you're involved with with the open source community or at least where wayfarer is absolutely so uh wayfair has made an investment in the open source community specifically notably with the tremor project you can go to tremor.rs and i'm actually speaking about it at cubecon that's where the topic comes from tremor is a early stage and uh event processing system where you can give it a lot of data for it to be able to ingest and then spit out downstream to other systems you may want to send events and notifications out to multiple systems based on what you see you may want to throttle the amount of data that you have coming in and that was a big topic that i also mentioned at the cloud native con uh and at tremorcon where you can deal with this really massive volume that we have to do at the scale that we exist as a as a business and just um filter it so that it doesn't overwhelm everything downstream in observability's sake well you know that tremor must be cool if it has its own con right yeah that's very cool you know you've arrived when you've had a con eventually i'm i'm i'm working toward dave khan we we'd make it dave and gary khan if we need to but oh absolutely so can you can you take those concepts of events and and data flow and and kind of up level that in terms of the kinds of things that are happening between customers and wayfair on a moment-by-moment basis so so give me an example of like you know what what is an event sure yeah so events if you're familiar with the open telemetry or observability framework you might call them signals where you have something happen on your infrastructure that's processed in a way that you would want to record so you might have a log that you need to be able to trace through later in case there's something happens or you just want to be able to comb your logs you may have uh metrics that you're sending in like how many requests you've gotten or how many bytes you've been processing in your service uh you may have baggage that you associate with that data um so yeah all of these different kinds of signals as defined in the open telemetry spec are things that we support in tremor and we supported before the hotel project really made it a form it was something we did out of necessity and similar products that you might find are like log stash and elastic in that whole stack okay so if so if uh if i'm looking for something for my home office uh although you can see i've got tons of garbage already in my home office um what what happens to me as a customer if all of what you just described goes wrong what happens to my experience that's a great question so as we're talking about tremor if something were to go wrong it shouldn't impact the experience of the service itself because tremor is designed to not create any load on your service as you are executing it you have the option to run it as a standalone server where you give it the resources that it needs by itself uh if that turns out to be too much of a burden for the application and you need to do a sidecar kind of model where you actually deploy it alongside your application directly in the same pod or sometimes even in the same container as a different process it's lightweight enough that you can do that which is part of the reason why we like it and why we built it is that we found that many of the other solutions for processing these signals just simply took up too much compute to be competitive with what we were able to create ourselves how and how long have you been with wayfair uh i've been with wayfair for almost three years uh three years in october or it is october so three years hooray hey hey happy happy anniversary yeah so obviously you couldn't have predicted the you know the the massive shift in all of our lives um and maybe you didn't completely fully appreciate just how well prepared wayfare was for this crazy shift in all of our lives when you entered in um i'm not gonna let you pretend uh that uh that you know that you knew and that your your iq is 20 points higher than it actually is because you decided to go to a place that was actually prepared but what what is share with us what that has been like i mean what is it like to be somewhere where the sky appeared to be falling and then all of a sudden the demands went through the roof what was that like that was a extremely chaotic but ultimately uh successful time for the company obviously um it's shown definitely in what you can find um in our stock and how we've been doing with technology that we did very well during the pandemic we were able to use the technology that we already had and be effective in adopting some more of the cncf portfolio and some more of like cloud native practices to make the um to make our infrastructure run better than it ever did at a time where we were in a crunch to be able to do better than we ever um had as a business and i believe that those two things are related the or this is my personal philosophy for sure that i believe that the adoption of these cloud native practices uh especially being pushed from the platform team that i work on were instrumental in being able to create an environment where developers can deliver value more reliably where then the experience of shopping at wayfair becomes dramatically better and can handle the scale that you see when everybody decides to start shopping everybody decides to start furnishing their home office i was going to make a joke that i bet that at least one of those things behind you was from wakefield you could be right although although some of the things over my shoulder are very strange movie prop type items so but uh but you would be you would be guessing correctly i was very very excited to talk to you um from uh from a technology standpoint because again you guys were prepared for this you you can't respond uh in a way quickly enough that doesn't crush you unless you've prepared and you've got a framework that draws upon cloud native technologies just just as you as you outlined um so against that backdrop what are you seeing in uh from a technology standpoint in retail in general are you are you plugged into that much think of think of legacy uh furniture outlets trying to pivot into the world of cloud native native take your take your wayfarer hat off you know your partisan hat in terms of competition off for a moment and and talk to me about you know if you're advising a fill in the blank legacy retail store that's just dying right now that wanted to have an online presence from a technical standpoint how would you advise them what would you steer them in the direction of i would definitely say that um just in time engineering has actually served wayfarer extremely well where we're not over engineering the solutions and using the big fancy tools until we know that we need them so i think that when we see businesses or we see anybody any organization that decides to adopt everything first and then see whether or not it scales up they don't see the results that they wanted because they're not using something that's appropriate for the size of the problem that they're trying to solve so for example if if an experience that i can share from what we went through uh i was part of and i've spoken and have some posts about um like being able to scale up just the automation infrastructure for wayfair where we were using a solution that worked pretty well but we didn't think about what was going to happen when it grew and we didn't react when it actually did grow and so by instead reassessing okay we're a different size company now we have different size needs for automation and different flexibility requirements to be able to use it effectively we need to be able to adopt containers we need to be able to support deployment into kubernetes how can we get there and then continuing to evaluate that even during the process of building and during the process of making that available to the rest of the company i think that if you're starting that process fresh or even if you're in the middle of that process it's important to right size the solution and consider whether or not it it's if your online business isn't mid-tier but it's enterprise then you need to build a system for that if you have an online system that's actually doing not much of your business don't build for the enterprise yet build for the size and then continue to scale it up as you go um another thing that i i just have to plug about the cncf solutions is that they're incredible at being flexible to that scale that if you pick things that go from low to mid tier then you can hand off from mid to high tier and then from high tier into enterprise scale and i think that those things are available in the cncf landscape and it's part of why we're excited to to be part of it ourselves so if you had a magic wand and you could solve one headache that you experience in your daily life from a technology perspective can you can you think of anything that you would uh you would conjure up absolutely uh i i struggle and have struggled pretty much my entire career uh with being able to get like a good picture of the adoption of any given tool within the company and i know that perhaps not every engineer um that works with technology within a big enterprise firm has to think about whether or not their tool is being used a lot um folks may not think about is the person next to me using python or is the next person next to them using java um being able to have that kind of insight into what people use how frequently they're deploying and how much they use it would be an incredible gain for us to be able to make better decisions about the platform of the company yeah yeah and you know you know the uh potentially the irony there is um at the sort of tip of the spear of your business understanding the customer everything about them you possibly can is so important to give them a really really good experience and sometimes enterprises that have that know all sorts of information about me don't know what their developers are doing in a whole list in a holistic fashion uh with a few clicks i can tell you exactly how many orders i've ordered from get from a given online retailer in the last nine years um but uh but i doubt they could tell me a lot about some of their infrastructure so that's that's interesting uh well what else what else can you share with us about wayfair are there any anything that's not super proprietary and secret that you could share that's an interesting data point we were joking beforehand about yeah what is it is it 8 billion in your sales is it red staplers or uh any kind of factoids that people would be surprised about yeah i i think folks um something that's definitely not proprietary because it's literally on github.com uh we just recently started putting a lot more elbow grease into our open source repositories it's becoming hacktoberfest now and we're very excited to be able to have these kind of more polished products things that we expect people to be able to contribute to where not even a year ago it wasn't uncommon to have teams within the company that would open source their project and then they would completely lose track of it and we had like some um we had to create new organizations to actually maintain them over time so i i feel like a really exciting thing that we're doing now is contributing to open source and earnest and actually getting developers time scheduled to be able to dedicate to that effort um i think a lot of the biggest companies that are the most successful uh make time for their developers to be able to contribute back as well as being able to contribute just to the proprietary code that every company has to maintain absolutely because human as human beings we don't want to be toiling in obscurity right and uh you know at what becomes a soul-killing exercise when you can actually get out there and have that sense of community uh which is you know it's central to uh to open source it's a testament to wayfair that they know that it's in their best interest as a as an organization to nurture that kind of talent uh uh within so uh on that on that very positive note uh i'd like to thank you so much for your time gary um and i appreciate the uh the plug for uh for shoes uh over over over your shoulder uh and uh just just wanna say again thanks a lot uh best of luck with your uh with your talk for q con and with that i will sign off thanks for joining this cube conversation with gary white of wayfair in our continuing coverage of kubecon cloud native con north america 2021 i'm dave nicholson thanks for tuning in you