Cloud

Wayfair brings products to life through digitally created imagery enabled by ML/AI sciences. Over the last several years, we’ve been investing in building 3D capabilities to achieve this at both a scale and cost not possible with traditional photography. Creation of these 3D renders requires significant computation (rendering) capabilities. In May 2022, Wayfair embarked on a Public Cloud Tech transformation journey from our own on-premise data center to the Google Cloud (GCP) which significantly added to our GCP operating costs.

In earlier installments we covered how our cloud journey started, talked about testing and validation, and discussed internal processes that positioned us for making rapid iterations and helped to achieve predictable delivery.

Why we decided to modularize

As our journey continues, we have already covered testing at a smaller scale, learning throughout the process, and setting our ambitious goal to move Wayfair Storefront to the cloud!

In the previous installment, we talked about testing smaller components first, expanding the scope gradually, and learning more about the platform of choice in the process.

Have you ever wondered how engineering teams tackle the challenge of ensuring reliability and performance amid increasing site traffic? If so, I hope the information in this four-part series will be of interest to you.

As we head into Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and retail’s peak season for 2018, I wanted to reflect back on some excitement we had earlier in the year at Wayfair; specifically how we reacted and built, as a tech team, toward challenges we hadn’t seen before. I hope other e-commerce and tech leaders who are on a scaling journey will be interested in what we hit, and frankly, it was an adventure that anyone in the technology might find interesting.

Ever since Google pioneered the concept of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), we’ve seen product reliability, accountability, and assorted innovation in this space skyrocket in importance and scope. At Wayfair, we’ve been working hard to evangelize contemporary solutions to tricky scalability scenarios, investing thoughtfully in cloud enablement and containerization.