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2021-Ship-It-Transcripts

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• The Skyhook team worked together in 2019 on a serverless project and have since been out of touch.
• The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on Skyhook as a travel website business, but also presented an opportunity to rethink their product and improve it.
• Skyhook is a website that allows users to book adventure trips with local guides, providing a unique and authentic experience.
• The team decided to move towards serverless technology, initially using AWS Lambda functions backed by an RDS database (Aurora).
• They later realized the limitations of this approach and began exploring other options, including DynamoDB and splitting their services into separate databases.
• The team eventually moved to a more modular architecture with each service having its own DynamoDB database.
• Switch from REST API to GraphQL/AppSync
• Implementation of a microservices-based architecture with serverless functions
• Improved reliability and reduced bugs in the system
• Reduced deploy times from 20 minutes to 3 minutes
• Increased testing and faster feedback cycles
• Addition of feature flags for rapid feature deployment and customer testing
• Using AWS AppSync for synchronous communication between microservices
• Utilizing AWS Event Bridge for asynchronous communication between services
• Implementing Next.js with Vercel for server-side rendering and caching of static pages
• Serving the application through a custom deployment environment using GitHub Actions and Vercel's zero-config option
• Achieving fast latency (10ms) in internal service interactions, but potentially improving it
• Exposing API services to individual microservices for data querying
• Using standardized JSON objects with schemas for event bus messages
• Discussion of Vercel vs Netlify for zero-config deployment
• Benefits of using Vercel with Next.js as the parent company
• Managing environments, including multiple PR-specific URLs and data migration
• GitHub Actions setup for automated testing and deployments
• Single repository approach for microservices, including benefits and challenges
• Automated testing and linting on code changes, including integration tests
• Configuration and setup of services using Hygen tool for CDK and AWS
• Storage of configuration in the repository next to usage
• Changes to infrastructure deployment using AWS CDK
• Avoidance of CloudFormation due to complexity and yaml issues
• Development experience improvements, including environment portability and data management
• Challenges with payments provider during pandemic, including disabled refunds and changed regulations
• Discussing potential solutions for improving development experience and overcoming current challenges
• The importance of customer experience and managing risks in third-party services, particularly with payment providers
• A case study on a travel company's experience with a payment provider that suddenly prevented automatic refunds across their API
• How the company resolved the issue by convincing their provider to re-enable automatic refunds for them
• An alternative solution using tools like Spreedly to hook in with multiple payment providers
• A second incident where a system issue was solved with an unorthodox approach involving event streams and Lambda functions
• The importance of prioritizing customers' needs over shipping code or adding new features
• A discussion on the feature "hosts sign-up" that improved the process for hosts to get signed up, resulting in a 5-fold increase in host sign-ups
• Development of a user-friendly cancellation feature on the Skyhook marketplace
• Utilization of third-party tooling (e.g. Algolia) to implement features such as search functionality and improve development speed
• Adoption of serverless tools (e.g. AWS Lambda) for faster code deployment and improved customer experience
• Use of Drip for email marketing services due to its e-commerce specialization
Gerhard Lazu: So in 2019 we spent a bit of time together. I found out about this new startup which is doing some interesting things with serverless, and we worked together for some number of weeks. It was basically a day in a week for some number of weeks... And that was a great experience. I really enjoyed myself,...

Alan Cooney: Good question. Obviously, the big thing is there's been a pandemic...

Gerhard Lazu: Right.

Alan Cooney: ...and essentially, for your listeners, Skyhook is a travel website, so a website where you can book adventure holidays. So obviously, this has impacted us quite hard, and it's been a challenge to get through that. But at the same time, we've taken this big opportunity to really rethink how we're doing...

Gerhard Lazu: \[04:16\] So Skyhook Adventure - what does it do as a company?

Alan Cooney: Essentially, at its heart, Skyhook is basically a website where you can book adventure trips, like hiking to Everest base camp... Really unique trips. Or canoeing all the way across Scotland. And when you do that, you're actually booking with a local guide. Not a big company, typically a one-man operat...

So that's kind of from the guest side or the customer side, in a way... But we're also on the other side, we're a business product as well; we're a place where the guides can manage their trips and do all this kind of admin that you usually do with your trip, that can take a few hours a day, and just automate most of t...

Gerhard Lazu: So from that, what you've just said, how did we end up with serverless? Because that's what's happening in the backend, right? What's the link between these adventures -- do you have to be really adventurous to choose serverless?

Alan Cooney: That's definitely true. It's probably one for Saul. Saul is the one who really introduced us first to serverless.

Saul Cullen: Yeah, it's a really good question, Gerhard. I think it probably goes back to when Alan got me along... So I initially got invited along to Skyhook to help out on the payments. Payments was causing quite a challenge. Payments in the travel world is quite a complex area. It's not as straightforward as yo...

What I said to Alan - we were using a Drupal system at the time... So this marketplace, the Skyhook marketplace was based on Drupal. And I said "Hey Alan, have you thought about using some different tech to do this? You know, there's lots of things out there, there's containers, and this new thing called serverless..."...

One part would be the trips that you browse and you look at, and I could sort of envisage that as almost like a static website, with content not changing particularly much over time. And then all these other constituent parts - the payments, the booking side, accounting, and all of those kind of aspects as being very d...

That's how we then obviously joined the team slightly later on, and we went down this track of diving into the serverless world, and created the first iteration of the new Skyhook platform, which was a serverless monolith really of sorts, based on AWS... And we're using RDS as the database. We've then gone on from that...

Gerhard Lazu: \[07:54\] Right. So even though you had all these Lambda functions - that's what serverless means to you, that's actually what it translates to, Lambda functions running on AWS - they were all backed by the same RDS database. Is that right?

Saul Cullen: Exactly, yeah. So we were using AWS' Aurora database initially. It took us quite a while to design it, and you had to zoom out to see the whole thing, which was an interesting experience the further we got... But yeah, that's exactly right, that's how we started.

Gerhard Lazu: So who can tell us a bit more about that, that zooming out part? ...how that happened, and what did you discover as you started zooming out.

Alan Cooney: It's funny, because Saul actually had at one point printed out a version of our database schema, and the thing was huge...

Gerhard Lazu: Right.

Saul Cullen: Yeah, I'd obviously worked with SQL databases quite a lot in the past, and that was where my experience lay at the time. There were conversations when setting out, "What route do we go down here? Do we start looking at some of the more serverless-centric databases here, some of the NoSQL databases that...

After much consideration, you're learning so much at an early stage of going into a new, bleeding edge technology of something that's new to you, that there's this constant trade-off between picking new tools and actually getting stuff done and shipping it. And it seemed at the time that they were going down the route ...

So we continued down that route for some time. The database grew and the zooming out got further and further back, and we started to run into challenges - database migrations, and updating, and changing, and the schema lock-in that we had, all started to... You know, it was something that worked for us and it worked fo...

Gerhard Lazu: And did you?

Saul Cullen: Yeah, we did, in the end.

Gerhard Lazu: This was the beginning, right? Aurora, all those challenges, SQL-based single database, migrations were challenging, a couple of other things... So this was like, what - two years ago? Three years ago?

Alan Cooney: Two years ago.

Gerhard Lazu: Two years ago. So what else did they look like from a database perspective?

Alan Cooney: It's super-interesting... So we've actually moved to really splitting up our services, like Saul mentioned. We have a service for managing displaying trips, and we have a completely separate one for managing bookings, another one for accounting... And actually, each one has its own database, which is a...

Gerhard Lazu: Interesting.

Alan Cooney: ...AppSync in particular, which is sort of managed GraphQL as a service. Both the API and the data layer have changed, but a lot of the underlying logic is pretty similar and is often just kept the same, just with more testing, and things like that.

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2021 Ship It Transcripts

Complete transcripts from the 2021 episodes of the Ship It podcast.

Generated from this GitHub repository.

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