Modernizing interactive experiences across LEGO House with Azure Kubernetes Service

Opened in 2017, the LEGO House in Denmark is the ultimate LEGO experience center for children and adults. In 2023, facing challenges with an array of custom-built digital experiences served from an aging on-prem data center, it began upgrading with Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

Upgrading “the ultimate LEGO experience”

LEGO House is an architectural marvel designed to resemble a stack of LEGO bricks. Located in the company’s hometown of Billund, Denmark, this "Home of the Brick" serves as the ultimate LEGO experience for children and adults who want to explore endless possibilities in creativity and learning. 

Opened to the public in 2017, it features interactive zones for creative play, exhibits showcasing the LEGO Group’s history, educational workshops, and artistic LEGO sculptures. Designed to inspire creativity and learning, the LEGO House not only celebrates the legacy of the iconic toy brand but also serves as a community hub for LEGO enthusiasts from around the world.

“The house is built on ‘Learning through Play’—the core of LEGO play,” explains Søren Bering Andersen, Head of Digital & Technology at LEGO House. Beyond the physical play with over 25 million LEGO bricks, the house offers users a wide range of 2D and 3D digital interactive engagements. “We believe you can learn a lot through play, which is why we have interactive experiences all around LEGO House,” adds Andersen. 

Guests can build a LEGO character, then bring it to life on a digital dance stage or create a stop motion video with their character creations as the hero, among other experiences. 

Andersen notes LEGO House “only use tech where it makes sense, where it adds something. The LEGO brick is always the starting point, but we use digital on top.” He explains his team’s challenge is to connect the physical brick and the digital experiences around them. For example, guests can build a fish using LEGO bricks, then convert it digitally to join a virtual tank with other guests’ fish. 

Six years after launch, LEGO House had greater insight into its guests, the spaces, and how experiences meshed with them. In 2023, it launched an effort to refresh many of the experiences’ front- and back-ends around these insights. 

Originally custom designed and developed with an array of different partners and served from an on-prem data center, the infrastructure supporting these interactive experiences was difficult to maintain for a modestly sized organization and staff. With all the customized builds and platforms, “it was super hard to error correct and update,” Andersen says. 

LEGO House began looking for a new platform for the next generations of LEGO House experiences, one with modern technologies that could be responsive to the needs of guests and the house tech team. 

"We want to create those canvases around the house where people get inspired, because there are endless possibilities in the LEGO brick,” says Andersen. 

Taking the “next step,” rebooting LEGO House with Kubernetes 

LEGO House turned to Microsoft to develop an entirely new approach to the experiences, one based on a “containerized, component-based setup” that offered “scalability and flexibility in our digital tech stack,” says Andersen. 

Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) was perfect in practice and a complementary metaphor to the LEGO brand’s brick-based utility. “We build from different components to build new experiences, change flows, try new things, just like using LEGO bricks,” Andersen says. 

Reducing or eliminating on-premises hardware dependencies in favor of a standardized, modern, cloud-based Kubernetes (K8s) approach has been a revolution in development efficiency and maintenance.

In addition to the migration, the LEGO House team worked collaboratively with Microsoft to launch City Architect, an interactive building experience powered by Azure IoT Edge Device, where color and placement of a LEGO brick changes a digitally projected landscape. 

In September, the house launched Robo Lab, where guests can program a beekeeper robot to plant as many flowers as possible, creating a sustainable garden for bees. As they play, students learn principles of programming, along with choices and consequences around biodiversity.

“We wanted a tech stack enabling us to learn, and scale, and use it to inspire the rest of the LEGO ecosystem, perhaps passing along some of the great things we build to LEGOLAND, in brand retail stores, or wherever,” says Andersen. 

On AKS, experiences will share a common foundation, allowing the reuse of elements between experiences. 

For example, the brick scanning technology used in the virtual fish tank experience can also power the MINI CHEF eatery where guests can build their meal with LEGO bricks. Efficiencies thrive, as services don’t need to be rebuilt from scratch; they’re available for integration through AKS. Creativity is a welcome by product, enabling developers to think beyond the formerly siloed experiences. 

Maintenance is also much easier with AKS, with fewer services and the ability to connect services across the application pipelines. Andersen notes that house experiences are “more stable, with higher uptime,” to satisfy happy guests. 

The LEGO House team also utilized Microsoft technologies like Key Vault for secure data management, Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) for identity services, Azure Files for cloud data storage, and Azure IoT Edge for real-time data processing.

Celebrating today’s modernization, ready for tomorrow’s opportunity 

With the two successful migrations and experiences complete, LEGO House has seen the benefits of Azure and AKS firsthand. Andersen says visitors have raved about the experiences. Internally, teams report greater freedom working in the tech stack. 

Azure empowers the LEGO Group’s developers, opening collaboration across the LEGO ecosystem. “The LEGO Group has 2000 engineers across the street, and partners with LEGOLAND that we can suddenly talk together and exploit different opportunities we couldn’t before,” Andersen says. The more standardized approach to technology allows them to capitalize on collective vision and applied creativity. 

This is where Andersen sees real value, enabling teams to iterate, learn, create new experiences and services for their guests in an ongoing cycle of innovation. 

The organization intends to complete migration of the remainder of LEGO House experiences by the end of 2023 and introduce nine new engagements over the next year. “We will actually rebuild the full house to run on Azure and AKS to create flexibility and scalability in our digital tech stack,” says Andersen.

While enjoying the immediate, near-term efficiency and performance metrics of its new K8s-based approach, Andersen is intrigued by Azure AI and its built-in capabilities for future ideation. 

“Maybe we’ll use its AI for bits and pieces, or maybe run things in a different way. Who knows?” he muses. “That’s the beauty of the Azure platform: whatever our guests need, we can take the services and apply them.” 

“In the long term [with Azure and AKS], we can iterate and learn, providing new services and experiences for our guests, making the house better and better,” says Andersen.

414 Views 0 Likes Introduce me  Read More