[roytries]

I work for a large webshop. I was amazed by how many engineers work here. But now, after two years, I understand why we need them. Handling millions of customers, sending millions of parcels, logistics, storage, customer support, etc... requires a lot of systems. It is definitely more complex that you would image at first glance.

All of those systems need each other's information. The shop needs to know if a product is available, and what price it is. Customer Service needs to know how it was sent and the tracking code etc,...

We've built hundreds of microservices to manage this. This is definitely not something that is easy in a monolith. (We came from a monolithic architecture, we're really happy we're now using microservices).

We're now also rolling out Istio on GKE. So who knows, they might be on to something at Hello Fresh.