RONIKA LEWIS: Hi.
Thanks for joining us today.
I'm Ronika Lewis.
I'm a Google product manager.
And today, I'm joined by MLB.
With me from MLB is Felipe Negron.
Felipe, thank you so much for joining me today.
How are you doing?
FELIPE NEGRON: I'm doing great.
I'm glad to be here.
RONIKA LEWIS: Awesome.
Thank you so much.
So Felipe, please, for the folks who
are tuning in who haven't had the opportunity to meet
with you, please tell us a little bit
about yourself and your team.
FELIPE NEGRON: Sure.
My name is Felipe Negron, and I've
been with MLB for the last three and a half years.
I'm their director of systems engineering,
responsible for all cloud orchestration, automation,
DevOps, and SRE functions.
I have a team of 13 and that's comprised of pretty much what
I've just described-- systems engineers, DevOps
engineers, and SREs.
RONIKA LEWIS: Awesome.
Thank you for sharing that with us.
Felipe, today in this Q&A breakout session,
I'd like to talk about the evolution of MLB,
and then just how empathy engineering has impacted
MLB and their footprint.
So let's jump right into it.
So evolution of MLB, day zero for you guys,
take us back to your unique perspective
as you were going on this app modernization journey.
FELIPE NEGRON: Sure.
So like I said, three and a half years ago, I joined the team.
And when I joined, I was tasked with migrating a bunch
of systems into the cloud.
Now, a lot of these systems were working on legacy environments.
And so it was not just a migration,
but it was a re-platform.
And in some cases, we did some lift and shift.
Initially, we were migrating into a single cloud.
But soon, we realized that we wanted
to build into multiple clouds.
And so we had a multicloud strategy.
The challenge there is we had to move a lot
in a short period of time.
So it was important for us to pick the right tools,
to pick the right technologies to get us there.
And I think that's when we looked at Kubernetes
as a container platform, allowing
us to build a consistent build-and-deployment pipeline
and deploy into multiclouds at the time.
RONIKA LEWIS: That's awesome to hear.
And so initially, you guys started off with GKE on-prem.
And then you started migrating into bare metal
clusters in your stadiums.
Talk to me a little bit about what that experience
was like for you guys.
FELIPE NEGRON: Well, before we got that, there
was a lot that went in between.
It was important for us to set up a cloud foundation properly.
And so as we looked at GCP and started building out there,
we used tools that allowed us to get there a lot faster,
tools like Terraform.
We build our CI/CD platform on top of GitHub
and on top of Argo.
And in doing so, we were now easily deploying
into the cloud.
So that gave us the opportunity to look
into what we were doing on our data centers and on-prem
ballparks.
And we said, you know what, we like this.
We want to be able to consistently deploy
the same way.
And that's why we introduced Kubernetes into the ballparks.
At the time, we were rolling out on Kubernetes.
But for those who run Kubernetes,
you know it's not for the faint of heart.
So when we start talking to our Google reps
and telling them the challenge, they came back,
and few years later came back with Anthos.
And so we started using Anthos in our ballparks.
What was interesting is, we started with Anthos on VM.
But we wanted to do better.
We didn't want that hypervisor challenge
on top of a hypervisor.
So we challenged Google again to see
if they can give us something more in line
with running Anthos or Kubernetes in bare metal.
And that's when we deployed Anthos on bare metal.
RONIKA LEWIS: So Felipe, it sounds
like GKE was working for you guys
initially, with the team and everything that you
had going on, your workloads.
And then you extended the cloud in the ballparks, right?
With bare metal.
Talk to me about what that impact was to the fans,
and even to your broadcasters who come to the ballparks.
FELIPE NEGRON: So yeah.
So in our ballparks, we actually had certain workloads
that we were running there, but were running them on VM.
This was before Kubernetes, before GKE.
But we saw how powerful Kubernetes
was for us in the cloud.
It gave us that consistent way to build and deploy,
regardless of cloud or regardless of the underlying
operating system.
It was Kubernetes.
It was the same whether we ran it in the cloud or on-prem.
And so we started rolling our own Kubernetes clusters
at the ballparks.
But for those who know how to run Kubernetes,
you know it's not for the faint of heart.
So there was a lot of overhead.
So we talked to Google.
We explained the situation.
And we told them what we were trying to do.
And they came back with Anthos.
Initially, it was Anthos on VM.
But over time, they came out with Anthos bare metal.
And that's what we have deployed across all our ballparks.
Now, deploying this to the ballparks
allows us to now run these applications
across our environment in the ballpark.
And that's important to us, because it's low latency.
We can have network connectivity problems,
but because that stuff is running in the ballparks,
we can still serve our partners there.
And so it was critical for us to make that shift to Kubernetes,
and even more importantly, make that shift to Anthos
on bare metal.
RONIKA LEWIS: I like that.
Yeah, I recall one time you sharing with me that, hey,
it went down in one stadium, and just like clockwork,
without a hitch-- no one even knew--
another ball park actually just picked right up
where it left off.
So that's really good to hear about the latency for you guys.
So I want to kind of get further on now.
So you're a little bit longer, further along in your journey.
Talk to me about now what the team makeup looks like,
and then what the infrastructure--
you kind of intimated a little bit about that.
But why has that changed now with the growth of the team
and the evolution of MLB?
FELIPE NEGRON: Well, knowing what
we wanted to do on the tech side allowed
us to build a team so that we could execute, and execute
a lot faster.
So my team of 13 engineers, they're all seniors.
And they have-- they're pre-programmed to know cloud.
And they didn't have the Kubernetes experience
and the cloud native experience.
They do now.
So focusing on that skill and going after the market
to bring those skills in was a lot easier than say, hey, we
need a database guy here, and a systems guy there,
and this guy there.
It made the process a lot easier.
Now we're sort of doubling down.
Everything's Kubernetes, everything is cloud-native.
And so we're focusing on the tools
to make it easier for our software engineers
to use the technology, but more importantly, not spend time
trying to figure it out, instead spend the time on building
new products.
And that's what this has allowed us to do.
RONIKA LEWIS: Yeah, I love that, too.
It sounds like the technology, ease of use
allowed your engineers to focus on things
that were more meaningful to your business's bottom line.
Continuing on with that, I'd like
to talk about, you and I, we've had so many conversations
this year.
We were even discussing multicloud now
as the future platform strategy for MLB.
And we were really going down that road.
But then something changed, and you guys went all in on GCP.
Talk to me a little bit about that.
What happened?
What changed for you?
FELIPE NEGRON: So early in my journey, at least here in MLB,
we were excited about multicloud because
of what Kubernetes gave us--
the ability to consistently deploy.
And I've said it several times already.
And so now it was realistic.
But as we started going down that path,
we quickly realized that it's an investment,
and not just a monetary investment but the skills
that you need to run on multiple clouds,
the complexities you have to build into your applications
in order to run in multicloud.
So we quickly pivoted and said, you
know what, yeah, multicloud is fun as a technologist
to achieve.
But is it realistic, especially with
what we want to do with our products, how
we want to build new and innovative ways to engage
our fans?
And so we sort of went all-in on GCP,
because we had a lot of the tech we
needed there alone to be able to get there.
RONIKA LEWIS: Yeah.
Multicloud definitely has a couple of factors
that make it either work for you as a strategy,
or sometimes maybe that's not the best strategy for you,
depending on things that you mentioned-- your workload
factors, your team dynamics, and even
other strategic factors like the digital experience
that, maybe your fans may be pushing.
You know, I'd love to talk even more so now about, you
guys have a robust GCP footprint.
You're using a lot of, what we call our first-party services,
Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub.
Talk to me a little bit about how
those things are enabling and accelerating
innovation for you.
FELIPE NEGRON: It's going to be a recurring theme here.
It's basically, let's not worry about this sort of stuff
so we can continue to build products for our fans
and for the game of baseball.
And that's basically what we do.
It's hey, let's use this service that we click a few buttons
and now we're up and running, versus let's figure
out how to build it and manage it and support it and make
sure it doesn't go down.
It's a no-brainer.
And so whether it's Cloud SQL, or your memory store services,
or something as simple as GCS buckets,
these are all services that--
they're robust, they have the SLAs.
And guess what, we don't have to manage it,
because Google does it for us.
And so that's important, because running this technology
is not easy.
But if you guys help us run that part of it,
it makes it a lot easier for us to focus on what's important.
RONIKA LEWIS: Yeah.
I love when we had the aha moment around Anthos Service
Mesh and managed control plane.
So I know you guys are not yet on that.
But talk to me a little bit about your excitement
as you guys prepare to take advantage of some of those.
FELIPE NEGRON: Well, as you know from all our conversations,
I often say, hey, you guys always put out something
that I've just finished developing internally.
And I think that's what Anthos Service Mesh did.
When you mentioned it and we were telling you
what we did to get around some of the challenges we were
having, and we were like, oh, why couldn't you come out
with that like six months ago?
And that was the aha moment.
Whether it's what we're doing with security and PCI,
or what we're doing to extend our services across clusters,
across regions, these are the challenges that we have.
And as a result of us talking about them,
you guys are coming out with the solutions rather quickly,
actually.
RONIKA LEWIS: So Felipe, what would you advise someone,
or what tips would you give someone who's on this journey,
in the same kind of breadth that you are on this journey
and where you are now?
FELIPE NEGRON: I would say that don't get caught up in
multicloud this and multicloud that, or on-prem
this, on-prem that.
I think you should have a strategy.
It's important to have a strategy.
But the technology is allowing us
to blur the lines between what's cloud and what's on-prem.
And so if you pick the right technology,
the cloud provider of choice is going to support that.
It's just what everyone's doing.
And it's what Google's done for us.
We've extended our cloud onto on-prem.
And now we have a cluster, a set of clusters,
across our ballparks that we can move workloads to.
We're running hot in the cloud, let's move it
on to the ballparks.
And with the technologies like Service Mesh,
with a lot of different products that Google is coming out,
it's making it easier and easier to sort of seamlessly shift
traffic in and out of our clusters.
And so yeah, don't get caught up.
And then lastly, just have the right team
to support your journey, because that
makes a world of a difference.
And Google made that happen--
made that easier, whether it was through training
or through engaging their product managers.
My team is better for it.
And as a result, we can continue to innovate in this space.
RONIKA LEWIS: Felipe, that's brilliant.
Thank you so much for joining us today for the insight
into the evolution of MLB.
Happy to hear all of these things
that you're sharing with us.
And I look forward to the next ball game.
Thank you so much again.
FELIPE NEGRON: Awesome.
Thank you.