Azure Kubernetes Service boosts the pace of feature development at Victoria’s Secret & Co.

A bold brand with a big following

Victoria’s Secret & Co. (VS&Co) is one of the most iconic brands in the world. The company is comprised of Victoria’s Secret and Victoria’s Secret PINK, which share a common purpose of supporting women in all they do, and Adore Me, a technology-led, digital-first innovative intimates brand serving women of all sizes and budgets at all phases of life.

What’s its secret to creating legions of loyal fans? Selling high-quality products to help women express their confidence, sexiness, and power and using its platform to create connection and community while celebrating the extraordinary diversity of women’s experiences.

VS&Co is focused on delivering world-class customer experiences across its stores, app, and website. “Our omnichannel experience is at the heart of everything we do. We’re always thinking about blending the physical and digital experience, so customers can start their journeys online and end in store or vice versa. We want everything to feel seamless,” says Kamal Abhinay, Head of Engineering & Architecture at Victoria’s Secret & Co.

Riding the waves of traffic

Like any omnichannel retailer, VS&Co contends with seasonal spikes in online traffic. “Our website gets millions of unique visitors during peak times. And we have seasonality which brings in volumes close to 20x than what we see in a normal day,” says Abhinay. As a brand with such a loyal following, events like product releases or marketing email blasts can cause big surges in traffic that strain the company’s bandwidth if not scaled up fast enough. And in the digital era, a page not loading fast enough can lead to customers abandoning their orders.

For decades, VS&Co had operated its e-commerce platform using a monolithic architecture and Java-based applications. But being on-premises meant that before every anticipated event, the company spent days scaling its site up, and often over-scaled to keep the site from buckling under traffic pressure. VS&Co eventually grew tired of incurring extra costs for unused compute power, and in 2016 shifted to a microservices-based architecture with custom applications written in Golang. The company used a combination of enterprise and open-source solutions integrated together to create a microservices-based ecosystem with distributed logging, telemetry, service discovery, and dynamic load balancing.

But over time, VS&Co faced increasing expenditures related to operational overhead and managing orchestrations. To minimize this, the company considered migrating to Kubernetes, but bristled at the level of maintenance required. “Managing a Kubernetes control plane is essentially a full-time job, requiring 24/7 Kubernetes administrator engineers to maintain it,” says Murali Sundararajan, EVP and CIO of Victoria’s Secret & Co.

Full service, minimal management

Wanting its engineers to focus on developing innovative capabilities for the business—and not managing infrastructure—VS&Co migrated its containers to Azure Kubernetes Service. And according to Abhinay, the decision was easy. “Azure just made sense for us. Choosing Azure Kubernetes Service not only provides us with the support and managed control plane, but also allows us to use most Kubernetes components as they are with fewer proprietary abstractions,” he says.

At the time of the migration, VS&Co was running its IT environment out of a 15,000 sq. ft. warehouse. Migrating to Azure meant downsizing to a mere 1,500 sq. ft., but with Microsoft as its partner, the company felt confident it could do so with minimal downstream effects on the customer.

“We got a great set of engineers from Microsoft with loads of support for making the migration happen and managing the environment. We held several brainstorming sessions to make sure that whatever capability we needed for our customers, we got it. If there was an innovative technology we wanted to leverage, the software was always there for us,” says Sundararajan. With the help of Microsoft, VS&Co went from planning to proof of concept in six months with zero disruptions to the business.

Availability around the world

Now on Azure Kubernetes Service, VS&Co no longer spends days manually preparing its site for sales. The company deploys its workloads knowing they’ll be automatically spread between Azure availability zones, giving the team peace of mind that they can handle a crush of traffic without disruption. “Deploying our workloads in multiple regions gives us ways to guarantee 99.99% availability for our business,” says Abhinay.

Another benefit for VS&Co is the ability to build and deploy containers on the fly. It is now launching 30 to 50 per day, totaling to roughly 3,300 annually. “Azure Kubernetes Service is so crucial because we can build containers and automatically scale them using native Kubernetes-based SDKs,” says Sundararajan. Not only are customers now getting thousands of new features per year, they’re also benefiting from better site performance. “By segmenting our microservices, we’re able to scale only the components that are essential to performance, as opposed to scaling every container we’ve ever deployed,” Sundararajan continues. “It’s helping our customers find products and hit the checkout page faster. That’s a win.” And according to Abhinay, these boosts in performance are leading to boosts in conversions. “Our site used to take 6-8 seconds to load a page, now we’re talking about 2-3 seconds. That is a 3x performance improvement, directly translating to improved customer experience and conversion,” he says.

VS&Co has also become more efficient with its own resources. Through the container networking interface (CNI) within Azure Kubernetes Service, the company’s engineers can identify the workloads needed to create an omnichannel experience and offload the orchestration and management of those workloads to Azure. The company uses Azure Key Vault to seamlessly manage information, like API keys, passwords, certificates, or cryptographic keys. And out-of-box Kubernetes constructs like ConfigMaps, load balancers, and Horizontal Pod Autoscaler (HPA) have allowed VS&Co to make the e-commerce platform more resilient while simplifying its architecture. “Going to Azure Kubernetes Service, the transition was very straightforward. We were able to bring in autoscaling, elasticity, and improved resiliency,” says Abhinay.

A nimble, scalable future

Overall, migrating to Azure Kubernetes Service has helped Victoria’s Secret & Co. improve the workflows and everyday productivity of its engineers. “Azure has enabled our engineers to innovate and experiment faster. As the newer cloud services are available to our engineers, we’re able to use them to simplify, optimize, and constantly think about efficiencies in how we operate our business,” says Abhinay.

Both Abhinay and Sundararajan are excited to continue bringing new Azure releases into the fold, as each update imbues innovation and ease into the business. “The site right now is much nimbler and more scalable. I can say my cost went down and the performance went up. That’s a typical graph anyone wants to see, and we saw that,” says Sundararajan.

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