Network as a product
This article will explain how we manage our network infrastructure as a product and build our product development strategy for our data centers.
What is a product?
A product is a service or item offered to a market that might satisfy a want or need. Take your mobile phone as an example:
Your phone itself is a product, so does the chips and the batteries in it that make your phone work. The applications are software products that serve your needs, such as entertainment and shopping. The internet service you buy is also a product that provides you with connectivity.
If there is a product, there is a need coming from the customer. However, sometimes the customer does not (or cannot) define the need directly, so you may need to build it from their demands. Let me try to explain by using mobile phone example:
As you would see above, the customer does not name a specific need. They do not ask for a mobile phone from you; they just say that they want to call their friends when they are not home. You could have given them a chip to insert in their brains, enabling telepathic communications or cups connected with ridiculously long wires that can convey voice between different cities.
How does this approach relate to network infrastructure?
Why does Trendyol have a data center? The customers didn’t ask Trendyol to get a data center for sure; they just wanted to buy some trousers online. So how does that demand turn into a need for three data centers?
Who is the customer?
The important thing here is to identify your customer. The network team’s customers are not Trendyol’s customers but the Trendyol itself. Trendyol business team analyzes customer needs and translates them into business demands as follows:
Please note that the need and the product would differ for other teams. For example, for the warehouse team, 100% availability may point to the need for shift work.
How do we build our strategy for network infrastructure?
Our product as the network team is the services we provide to Trendyol business and other technology teams within Trendyol.
Our target is to meet business demands on time, and there are obstacles that we should overcome to reach our target. Find below the steps that we follow to set our goals:
- Clarify the needs. Evaluate the demands of business teams and clarify what kind of needs they are creating in your domain.
- Identify problems. List any issues you might encounter while trying to meet the needs.
- Decide the actions. Define the actions to meet customer demands while overcoming problems.
Let’s visit our previous example and work on “100% availability” demand:
Business demands 100% availability for Trendyol. This demand creates a need for a 100% available network connection and infrastructure. However, network equipment or links may fail due to physical disruption or hardware problems. Therefore, we need to build a design with location, node, and link redundancy to ensure that the services will not be affected even if the nodes fail or lose a data center due to a natural disaster.
Another need to achieve high availability is to detect any malfunction quickly. We identify problems that prevent this goal and define an action plan to solve them as a final example:
Network infrastructure strategy
We set three main goals for network infrastructure. You can find them below with reasons.
Network infrastructure should scale up as quickly as the demand from Trendyol’s customers, and infrastructure should always be up and running to serve our customers 7x24x365.242199. Therefore, our first goal is scalability and reliability.
The larger the infrastructure, the harder it is to locate the point of failure in an incident. We should be aware of what’s going on in our network to detect any anomaly on time. Our next goal for our growing infrastructure is observability.
We are a tech company. We should always look for ways to improve ourselves and our infrastructure technology. Our never-ending goal for tech teams is to embrace new technology and improvement.
We’ll continue to shape our roadmap according to business goals to give our customers the best e-commerce experience and improve our data center services for all the tech teams.
I hope you enjoyed the article. Please let me know your comments and suggestions!
Ezgi
