Meet Miro Engineering: Yolanda Robla discusses service meshes
Miro is an online, visual collaboration workspace designed to unlock creativity and accelerate innovation. In this blog series, we spotlight the people of Miro Engineering, so you can get to know the faces behind the platform. Our distributed team spans the globe across 12 regional hubs and 8 time zones, including offices in Amsterdam, Austin, Tokyo, and Berlin.
Here you’ll meet Yolanda Robla, based in Barcelona, who leads the Service Mesh project at Miro.
What drew you to engineering as a career?
I’ve liked computers since I was a child. They’re my hobby, my passion. When my parents bought me my first computer, it came with a language programming book and I loved looking at this book. I had so much curiosity for how the computer could do all the things it did! I took some computer classes for children as well, and when I was old enough, I went to university to study computers. I’ve been working in IT since I was 20, building strategies and focusing a lot on utilization and the latest DS coordinators.
How long have you worked at Miro?
A year ago, I got a ping from a recruiter. The opportunities he was talking about to lead some parts of the infrastructure team and some initiatives meant I could lead a project from the start. I joined in November 2021.
Where are you based right now?
I live near Barcelona. It’s part of what attracted me to Miro: I’ve been here for 10 years and didn’t want to go to an office every day. I like when I can visit the hub office in Amsterdam once or twice a month, but usually I prefer working from home.
Walk me through a typical day for you as a software engineer at Miro.
In my current role at Miro, I am leading the transformation of monolith architectures to microservices, enrolling them into Service Mesh inside Kubernetes (Istio). I’m not coding at the moment — I’m doing more configuration, testing, running scripts for automations, seeing how they behave and scale, and working in sprints. Miro works at a surprisingly quick speed. You still need to have meetings and go through several layers, but you have more freedom to make decisions. This is part of what attracted me to working here: the speed, the freedom, the development opportunities. This project started in December and now it’s ready to be launched!
Tell me more about Service Mesh. What does this project involve?
Miro has been working with a single application that does everything, which means it may have lots of problems when it grows. What we’re doing is splitting the application into small parts called microservices. Each small piece has its own functionality, and their own limits, and they need to communicate with each other. Service Mesh is the glue: It’s how you make all the pieces communicate together in a secure way and track all that data. It’s a platform to host all these microservices, and it’s a very interesting project I had the chance to build from the ground up.
Wow! What does the project roadmap look like?
The project went GA in June 2022. We started to integrate with some teams, evaluating their feedback, and improving features and documentation as requested.
Our team established a deadline for February 2023, when all microservices needed to be on the mesh. It means that now most teams are relying on the mesh for their service to service communication, except some particular cases.
When teams started to use the project in production, we realized the need for more stability, better observability, and better documentation. Also, we identified the need for other features, to cover different use cases.
We are now in this phase of improvement, to provide a mature and reliable solution, that can accommodate all use cases.
What’s it like working remotely with your team?
For us, it works great. I work with six other people, all divided into different efforts. I’m the Team Lead for the mesh effort and work with architects on other teams, and they’re remote as well. My other team members are in Amsterdam, but we have regular meetings over Zoom and Slack. We also interact with a lot of other teams.
What is one thing that has surprised you about working as an engineer at Miro?
I think from the conversations I’ve had with colleagues, they thought we’d do a lot of work on the front end, but there’s a lot of interesting work behind that. There’s so much infrastructure work and we’re scaling so fast. It’s a very interesting challenge actually!
One more thing…
Miro is growing and hiring! Visit miro.com/careers to learn more.
We’ll continue to feature Miro Engineering employees on our blog, so you can get a glimpse into their roles and the impact they have at Miro. Be sure to follow us to get reminders in your inbox when we post about engineering culture, technology issues, and product developments.
