Matthew Lawson of IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) joins Mark Mirchandani and Priyanka Vergadia today, telling us all about IKEA Retail (Ingka Group)’s move to the cloud. Engineering Manager Matt and his team primarily focus on the early stages of development at IKEA Retail (Ingka Group), helping the company with research and planning as well as development. Lately, they have been focused on incrementally moving IKEA Retail (Ingka Group)’s digital presence to the cloud.

Matt explains the digital shift process for IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) and why they chose to modernize and move pieces to the cloud over time. By illustrating through examples, he details projects the team worked on during this digital transformation. Matt also talks about the changes to the IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) Digital DNA, emphasizing progress made in their digital culture to allow for the drastic change from on-prem to the cloud. Using managed services like Google Cloud Run, IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) has been able to adapt and grow in the cloud. Because IKEA Retail (Ingka Group)’s culture is developer-supportive, Matt and his team were able to research and convince the company that managed services in the cloud was the way to go, and developers were allowed some autonomy to choose things like GKE to create an effective cloud environment for IKEA Retail (Ingka Group).

Next year, Matt and his engineering team are hoping to run some online hackathons and other events.

Matthew Lawson

Matthew Lawson is responsible for leading a small innovation team at IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) in southern Sweden. He has worked within the IT/Digital industry for 13 years and has deep experience and knowledge in application development, automation, DevOps and cloud technologies - especially serverless. He has a deep passion for enabling teams to quickly provide business value across the entire digital and physical customer journey.

Cool things of the week

• Next OnAir as it happens: All the announcements in one place blog
• A developer’s take: Get the most out of Cloud AI Week at Next OnAir blog
• BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment Inc. brings PAC-MAN to the real world in PAC-MAN GEO blog

Interview

• IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) site
• Matt’s Next Session: Serverless Functions (FaaS): Secure, Scalable, Resilient, Anywhere site
• ML Kit site
• Compute Engine site
• Cloud Run site
• Google Cloud Functions site
• Pub/Sub site
• BigQuery site
• GKE site
• Firestore site
• IKEA Retail (Ingka Group) is hiring! site

Tip of the week

This week, we get a great tip from our friend Grant on using Google Cloud Functions! github

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Priyanka is working on sketches like this summary of Google Cloud Next and more GCP Comics!