Add Buffer case study. Updates to Ancestry and Wink case study. Updates to Case Study index. Sizes fixes from logo images. (#4568)
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Kaitlyn Barnard
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Andrew Chen
Andrew Chen
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---
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title: WINK Case Study
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layout: none
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class: gridPage
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title: Wink Case Study
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layout: basic
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case_study_styles: true
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cid: caseStudies
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css: /css/style_wink.css
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---
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<!DOCTYPE html>
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<html>
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<head>
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<meta charset="utf-8">
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<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
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<link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto:300,400" rel="stylesheet">
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<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/css/style_wink.css">
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<title>WINK Case Study</title>
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</head>
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<body>
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<div class="banner1">
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<h1>CASE STUDY: <img src="/images/wink_logo.png" class="logo" width="13%" style="margin-bottom:-4px"><br>
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<h1>CASE STUDY: <img src="/images/wink_logo.png" width="13%" style="margin-bottom:-4px"><br>
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<div class="subhead">Cloud-Native Infrastructure Keeps Your Smart Home Connected</div>
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</h1>
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</div>
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@@ -30,14 +20,12 @@ cid: caseStudies
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<hr>
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<section class="section1">
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<div class="cols">
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<div class="col1">
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<h2>Challenge</h2>
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Building a low-latency, highly reliable infrastructure to serve communications between millions of connected smart-home devices and the company’s consumer hubs and mobile app, with an emphasis on horizontal scalability, the ability to encrypt everything quickly and connections that could be easily brought back up if anything went wrong.
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<br>
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<br><br>
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<h2>Solution</h2>
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Across-the-board use of a Kubernetes-Docker-CoreOS Container Linux stack.<br><br>
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</div>
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@@ -46,8 +34,8 @@ cid: caseStudies
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<h2>Impact</h2>
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"Two of the biggest American retailers [Home Depot and Walmart] are carrying and promoting the brand and the hardware,” Wink Head of Engineering Kit Klein says proudly – though he adds that "it really comes with a lot of pressure. It’s not a retail situation where you have a lot of tech enthusiasts. These are everyday people who want something that works and have no tolerance for technical excuses.” And that’s further testament to how much faith Klein has in the infrastructure that the Wink team has built. With 80 percent of Wink’s workload running on a unified stack of Kubernetes-Docker-CoreOS, the company has put itself in a position to continually innovate and improve its products and services. Committing to this technology, says Klein, "makes building on top of the infrastructure relatively easy.”
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</div>
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</div>
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</div>
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</section>
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@@ -59,7 +47,6 @@ cid: caseStudies
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<section class="section2">
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<div class="fullcol">
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<h2>How many people does it take to turn on a light bulb?</h2>
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@@ -69,7 +56,6 @@ cid: caseStudies
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Wink was incubated within Quirky, a company that developed crowd-sourced inventions. The Wink app was first introduced in 2013, and at the time, it controlled only a few consumer products such as the PivotPower Strip that Quirky produced in collaboration with GE. As smart-home products proliferated, Wink was launched in 2014 in Home Depot stores nationwide. Its first project: a hub that could integrate with smart products from about a dozen brands like Honeywell and Chamberlain. The biggest challenge would be to build the infrastructure to serve all those communications between the hub and the products, with a focus on maximizing reliability and minimizing latency.<br><br>
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"When we originally started out, we were moving very fast trying to get the first product to market, the minimum viable product,” says Klein. "Lots of times you go down a path and end up having to backtrack and try different things. But in this particular case, we did a lot of the work up front, which led to us making a really sound decision to deploy it on CoreOS Container Linux. And that was very early in the life of it.”
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</div>
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</section>
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@@ -83,6 +69,7 @@ cid: caseStudies
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<div class="fullcol">
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Concern number one: Wink’s products need to connect to consumer devices in people’s homes, behind a firewall. "You don’t have an end point like a URL, and you don’t even know what ports are open behind that firewall,” Klein explains. "So you essentially need to have this thing wake up and talk to your system and then open real-time, bidirectional communication between the cloud and the device. And it’s really, really important that it’s persistent because you want to decrease as much as possible the overhead of sending a message – you never know when someone is going to turn on the lights.”<br><br>
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With the earliest version of the Wink Hub, when you decided to turn your lights on or off, the request would be sent to the cloud and then executed. Subsequent updates to Wink’s software enabled local control, cutting latency down to about 10 milliseconds for many devices. But with the need for cloud-enabled integrations of an ever-growing ecosystem of smart home products, low-latency internet connectivity is still a critical consideration.
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<br><br>
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<h2>"You essentially need to have this thing wake up and talk to your system and then open real-time, bidirectional communication between the cloud and the device. And it’s really, really important that it’s persistent...you never know when someone is going to turn on the lights.”</h2>
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In addition, Wink had other requirements: horizontal scalability, the ability to encrypt everything quickly, connections that could be easily brought back up if something went wrong. "Looking at this whole structure we started, we decided to make a secure socket-based service,” says Klein. "We’ve always used, I would say, some sort of clustering technology to deploy our services and so the decision we came to was, this thing is going to be containerized, running on Docker.”<br><br>
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At the time – just over two years ago – Docker wasn’t yet widely used, but as Klein points out, "it was certainly understood by the people who were on the frontier of technology. We started looking at potential technologies that existed. One of the limiting factors was that we needed to deploy multi-port non-http/https services. It wasn’t really appropriate for some of the early cluster technology. We liked the project a lot and we ended up using it on other stuff for a while, but initially it was too targeted toward http workloads.”<br><br>
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@@ -120,6 +107,3 @@ cid: caseStudies
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Wink, which was acquired by Flex in 2015, now controls 2.3 million connected devices in households all over the country. What’s next for the company? A new version of the hub - Wink Hub 2 - hit shelves last November – and is being offered for the first time at Walmart stores in addition to Home Depot. "Two of the biggest American retailers are carrying and promoting the brand and the hardware,” Klein says proudly – though he adds that "it really comes with a lot of pressure. It’s not a retail situation where you have a lot of tech enthusiasts. These are everyday people who want something that works and have no tolerance for technical excuses.” And that’s further testament to how much faith Klein has in the infrastructure that the Wink team has have built.<br><br>
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Wink’s engineering team has grown exponentially since its early days, and behind the scenes, Klein is most excited about the machine learning Wink is using. "We built [a system of] containerized small sections of the data pipeline that feed each other and can have multiple outputs,” he says. "It’s like data pipelines as microservices.” Again, Klein points to having a unified stack running on CoreOS Container Linux and Kubernetes as the primary driver for the innovations to come. "You’re not reinventing the wheel every time,” he says. "You can just get down to work.” </div>
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</section>
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</body>
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</html>
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