BEN WALTERS: Hey, everyone, welcome to a
special build 2022 Customer Tech Talks.
Now, a lot of businesses are built on innovation,
and one of the things that's driving
that innovation is caffeinated individuals.
Now, with me today is Austin Smart,
senior engineer for
the Digital Platform Engineering Team.
Austin, thanks for joining us.
AUSTIN SMART: Happy to be here, Ben.
BEN WALTERS: Now, we obviously all know
who Starbucks is and what they do,
but you were key in helping Starbucks make that move
from On-Premises up to the Cloud and to
take advantage of Azure Kubernetes Services.
Can you maybe share with everyone what drove
the idea to make this move and how you went about it?
AUSTIN SMART: We have a large
On-Premise environment.
Our move to Azure has been long.
We had a few teams that initially
took and moved their own services into Azure.
When it came time for
the revitalization of our On-Premise infrastructure,
we had a choice.
We can either invest in revitalizing it or look at
adopting what was quickly
becoming an industry standard of public Cloud.
Given that history of adopting Azure successfully,
we looked at what it would take for us as
a platform team to adopt
Azure Kubernetes Service and provide a platform
for the rest of our application teams
to bring our services up into the Cloud.
BEN WALTERS: Now, one of those services
you may have drive or and more importantly,
we're really behind or part of
the back end for that mobile ordering application.
Now, you've got some of those up there
now and they're running in
a production or semi production environment.
Can you explain to everyone
what it's like to run those day to
day and some of the things you've
noticed since moving those up to AKS?
AUSTIN SMART: Our On-Premise infrastructure
was highly segmented in a what
you could call multi-tenant architecture.
When we looked at what it would take to run AKS,
we really wanted to keep
some of that multi tenancy alive.
Really AKS has allowed us to do that in
much more secure way than what
we had On-Prem and On-Prem was pretty secure.
As we looked at individual services and
what it would take to move those up into the Cloud,
it's really a deep conversation
with each service owner and what it
takes to fit the quirks
of that service into the platform.
We have some boilerplate deployments that we are really
able to leverage the Kubernetes ecosystem to
get the service up and running quickly.
But as we take and fit the service to the platform,
we leverage that boilerplate to move quickly.
BEN WALTERS: Now, you have just got
a number of services,
you said that you running On-Premises and
migrating each of those app,
obviously, came with its own complexities.
What were some of the challenges you faced while
you were moving those services
out there and how did you address them?
AUSTIN SMART: To start with a lot of the
challenges were internal to our team.
We had zero Kubernetes experience when we started,
so Kubernetes is a daunting project.
Each of the team members took on
learning it in their own way,
and we quickly fell in love with it
as an option for building a full featured platform.
One of the other challenges that we had
was running public Cloud
within the strict requirements of star based technology.
That's probably not unfamiliar to
anybody that runs within a large enterprise.
What we quickly learned was we were in need
of flexibility at the platform side,
both to empower our application teams,
but also to empower us as
a platform team to move within those requirements.
Kubernetes and AKS have just the right set of
improvements and feature sets that
allow us to do that at Starbucks.
BEN WALTERS: Now, looking back over
your time with AKS,
no doubt there were some probably
some lessons and things like that you would
share with other individuals who are looking to
make that move to AKS.
What are some of the lessons or things
you'd recommend people do,
or maybe even things to avoid during that migration?
AUSTIN SMART: We have quite
a few learnings,
so I've been a couple of your journey.
The biggest one for me
was trust the product team of AKS,
they're great at taking customer feedback.
As long as you provide them with that feedback.
They come out with features
that are incredibly relevant,
especially to us that run
AKS as a platform offering.
The other thing that I would warn folks
against is getting locked into individual tools.
Kubernetes is a rich, open source ecosystem.
With that comes many options
for us we got stuck with the stackable tools early
on that if we had taken the time to look across
the board at the dozen different offerings
and evaluate each of them,
it would have saved us a lot of
engineering hours and we would have
come out ahead a lot sooner.
BEN WALTERS: That's really great insight
and really sets up that idea of
with AKS comes great power
and great responsibility altogether.
Well look, Austin, thank you
so much for taking the time with us today.
It's been great to hear about what
Starbucks is doing and how you're
taking advantage of Azure
Kubernetes Services within the business.
AUSTIN SMART: Thanks for having me, Ben.
BEN WALTERS: Of course, if you want to
start your own journey with Azure Kubernetes Services,
you can check out all of the sessions on
the Microsoft Build 2022 website.
You can also head to Microsoft Line to get started with
self-paced training modules and
really kick start your learning journey.
Now, if you'd like to join us on
future episodes of Customer Tech Talks,
you can e-mail us at CTTalk@Microsoft.com
to get started.
Thanks again and we'll see you next time.