#53 Scaling GreenOps at Back Market with Dawn Baker

Update: 2025-02-25

Description

Changing its Cloud provider is never small potatoes, especially when a platform operates up to 40,000 containers and has about 4 million unique visitors a day to its website. Yet Back Market made the move from AWS to Google Cloud Platform motivated primarily by … sustainability concerns! In this episode its CTO, Dawn Backer, chats with Gaël Duez and covers a wide range of GreenOps topics such as:

☁️ Why they switched from AWs to GCP

📏 The needed granularity in carbon measurement

💸 Why FinOps is a no brainer to boost sustainability

🏦 The importance of carbon P&L in decision making

⚖️ The Dilemma of running GreenOps between carbon reduction and faster cloud instances

And much more!

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Dawn's sources and other references mentioned in this episode:

Transcript (auto-generated)

Dawn (00:00 )

It is always important to be controlling costs when you're a CTO and infrastructure is always a significant component of the PNL. And if you can make sure people are focused on the environmental impact, it will have a cost impact. And so you can advocate for GreenOps because it is tied to the bottom line.

Gaël Duez (00:04 )

Hello everyone, welcome to Green IO, the podcast for responsible technologists building a greener digital world, one byte at a time. Every two Tuesdays, our guests from across the globe share insights, tools and alternative approaches, enabling people within the tech sector and beyond to boost digital sustainability. Migrating to a new cloud provider because of the lack of sustainability commitment from the previous one is almost never seen in our IT industry. So I was really impressed with the talk delivered by two Back Market senior engineers at Green IO Paris last year. So impressed that I wanted to learn more about Back Market engineering culture. I discovered teams who have seriously embraced the GreenOps approach and whose feedback could greatly benefit product and tech teams, no matter the industry they work in. This is why I'm so excited to welcome Dawn Becker, Back Market CTO, on the show today. Dawn is a senior engineering leader who has managed infrastructure, operations, and software development teams in organizations ranging from 50 to more than 100,000 employees, from startups to Fortune 500 companies and her functional expertise spans across many layers of the technology stack, including data center, network systems and database operations, software engineering, course, you name it, I guess you understood that she is a very versatile expert. Welcome to the show Dawn and thanks for making room in your busy calendar for this interview.

Dawn (02:06 )

Thank you for inviting me, Gaël. It's a pleasure to be here.

Gaël Duez (02:09 )

Pleasure is mine. I'd to start asking you what is the achievement from your teams which you are the proudest in terms of sustainability.

Dawn (02:19 )

So it is definitely the migration of our infrastructure to a new cloud provider. We did it in under six months. And we have up to 40,000 containers in our infrastructure. So it's a significant achievement. And it's been great results for us so far.

Gaël Duez (02:42 )

Yeah, what was the result that you were looking such a massive project? just before you answer this question, for the sake of understanding, what size of the tech stack and the human power are we talking about at Back Market? How many engineers?

Dawn (03:00 )

Yes, so we have about 260 engineers at Back Market. We operate up to 40,000 containers and we have about 4 million unique visitors a day to our site. We work really hard as a company to be conscious about our impact on the environment. And so when we were evaluating our next steps for infrastructure. were at a point where we needed to modernize our infrastructure. We're a 10 year old company and as happens in 10 year old companies, we had a bit of debt that we needed to pay down and it was going to require us to recast our infrastructure. And to do that, it gives you the opportunity, which doesn't come along very often to do a change in cloud providers.

Gaël Duez (04:00 )

That was also an opportunistic move because it's not like you were scaling up the tech stack and suddenly in the morning you say, okay, enough is enough. I want to change my cloud provider. It was also connected with a reflection on the current state of your tech stack and the level of technical debt you have reached. And okay, enough is enough. We need to refactor a bit and maybe even that's a great timing to ask ourselves on which platforms do we want to be hosted? Am I correct to state it that way?

Dawn (04:31 )

Exactly.

Gaël Duez (04:32 )

And what were the results that you wanted to achieve in terms of sustainability by migrating from, I guess we can name them, it was made public in Green IO Paris that you migrated from AWS to Google Cloud Platform.

Dawn (04:48 )

Yes, so the biggest factor in the decision in the end was the impact and our ability to track it. number one, the visibility we get from Google Cloud on our CO2 emissions and the ability to locations with renewable power was a big factor in our decision we're a B Corp and this becomes a very important aspect of what we do is to be able to report on that. So that became an important component of the decision-making process. And it's also that we can start to break down and start to invest in breaking down not only that information for the infrastructure, but each component of what we run and be able to align teams around the impact that they have. we're still at the early stages of this because we've just finished our migration in April. But we have ambitions to create greater and greater insights with more and more detail so that we can have a clear view of what it costs to serve our users specifically for certain functionality and be able to make decisions about engineering investment on ways to improve that over time.

Gaël Duez (06:11 )

So it means that the ultimate goal is that each team, feature team, impact teams, I don't know how you name them, are accountable of the amount of greenhouse gas emissions they emit.

Dawn (06:27 )

Yeah, exactly.

Gaël Duez (06:28 )

And that was the number one reason for you to migrate into Google Cloud because they can provide this level of accuracy.

Dawn (06:38 )

it was the biggest weight in the decision. There are of course other factors. There's a better visibility and higher impact we have on the roadmap and discussions that we can have with our, our account team, the level of partnership that's provided. were also big factors. We run on Kubernetes. So having the managed GKE offering with definite uplift for us.

Gaël Duez (07:06 )

You mentioned Kubernetes. There are several projects around incorporating sustainability natively in K8 and also putting them in the CI-CD. Is it the sort of project that you're looking for

Dawn (07:22 )

Well, first we want to be able to have the level of granularity, which doesn't really exist today, on knowing for what type of instance that we choose, what can be the carbon footprint for that. And we did this. One of the engineers on my team, Florian Valeye he wrote an open source contribution that would, for AWS, using data set provided by Teeds. They did some research in 2021. So he wrote an open source tool called Track Carbon. A