Work
Exportable order history for Lowe's Pro
A Google Cloud application suite giving Lowe's Pro business customers exportable purchase history, replacing a flow that ran on IBM WebSphere Commerce.
- Period
- 2019—2020
- Role
- Pod architect
- Stack
- Spring Boot · Cloud Pub/Sub · GKE + Istio
- Result
- 6 engineers led
Pro customers are businesses, and businesses need their purchase history in a spreadsheet at tax time. The capability had never existed, and the system it would have to live in was IBM WebSphere Commerce.
The approach
Requests came off the front end through Cloud Pub/Sub rather than synchronously, which meant a slow export couldn’t hold a web thread and a burst of them couldn’t take the site down. Generated files landed in Cloud Storage and came back out over REST, secured with JWTs from a central issuer. The suite ran containerized on GKE with Istio handling routing and RBAC.
Black Friday
The order-history store was re-platformed behind a circuit breaker specifically to survive peak load — the deadline wasn’t a sprint boundary, it was the fourth Friday in November.
The part that paid for it
Eliminating the WebSphere Commerce dependency generated recurring licensing savings that outlasted the project.