>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to a CUBE conversation. Always love when we can dig into practitioner discussions, and one of the editorial themes I've been really looking into in 2020 has been discussion of server lists. So really excited to welcome to the program, Dave Anderson, he is director of technology at Liberty Mutual, coming to me from Ireland. Dave, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu, delighted to be here. >> All right, so I think most of our audience is probably familiar with Liberty Mutual. You work in the software group, Liberty IT, as part of Liberty Mutual. If you could just start us off, give us a little bit about your background, and your group's role inside the organization. >> Sure, Liberty IT started 20 years ago as really sort of an internal software host. Part of the Liberty Mutual group, we're part of Liberty Mutual Technologies. So we kind of work across all the markets in Liberty Mutual and all the kind of global locations. My role as director of technology is really think about what's the technical direction of Liberty IT? I can lead the architects with my group and really thinking about global architecture of Liberty Mutual and how can we provide business value in the mission going forward. >> Excellent, so Dave I guess what is the just kind of overall business and IT relationship? When I think of companies like yours, usually MNA comes in their growth expansions and digital transformation's been one of those buzzword discussions. But absolutely you need to be close to your customers there's lots of services that you need to provide online. How are some of those overall dynamic impacting how IT is supporting the business? >> That's a great question Stu. I mean technology has always been a key differentiator in Liberty Mutual. Even as my group was setup, like I said 20 years ago. It was always seen as a differentiator as something that we can be very good at. We've always been quite close to be in the cutting edge of technology. Many companies would say, "We're not an insurance company, we're a technology company that sells insurance." We are an insurance company, that's very important but we also need to understand that using the latest technology i.e. the cloud providers, really helps us deliver value to our business partners and customers. It is critical that we have a very tight partnership with our business partner. >> Excellent so yeah 20 years, a lot has changed in that time. Give us a little bit if you can, share a snapshot of where you are kind of in the cloud discussion. And what are the relationships between kind of the infrastructure side of the team and the development side of the team? And excepting that'll lead us forward to the server discussion. >> Sure I mean I joined Liberty about 12 years ago, 13 years ago and I actually started in one of the digital channels, that existence of digital channels. And probably almost 10 years ago our CEO James McGlannan quite a visionary, started kind of pressing the public cloud agenda and we started discussing public cloud as a potential future. It was a really exciting time. Cause I think the infrastructure development we all are in, gosh what's the possibilities of public cloud. And as you know the cloud itself it probably changes every year, it's redefined, there's new capabilities. I'm not sure we could envisage where we are today back when we started that conversation. Like every large enterprise, the initial conversation's around how do we enable this? How do we make this safe? How do we protect our data? All the usual kind of questions you would have. But in a way we kind of really joined together the very different departments. We thought, well how do we move the enterprise forward? And as well I mean we want to get a global capability for cloud was very important. And bringing up the velocity that we can deliver value quickly to our business partners. We didn't do it for technology's sake we did it to contribute real value for the business. And one of the really interesting things that we talked about is we shied away from counting how many virtual machines do we have in the cloud. That wasn't really a good metric for us. How are we delivering value to your business partners? That was kind of the metric that we chased and continue to chase. >> Well that's excellent how you kind of laid that out. I'm wondering if you could help extend that and bring us into where serverless fit into that discussion. I loved how you say it's not about number of VM's or the new shiny thing. So, what was it that led to your first use of serverless? And bring us a little bit along that journey that you've been going through. >> Sure, well one of the things that I've always found critical working in technology is that curiosity. But in a search for what's next. So, within micro IOS charts my people will say, "Where do we need to get to? What is 3 to 5 years out?" And we've a lot of really fantastic peers right across Liberty Mutual. Bright, open minded, they can think ahead. So one of my team was at I think it was re:Invent in I think it was 2013, where the launched Lambda for 2014. And each my crew were excited. They can build their first small application. It was actually a document generation. I think they were using some propriety systems. So they built a document generation solution. I couldn't believe the amount of ROM cost that was saved. It probably knocked something like 97% off the cost. Couldn't believe it. And we started saying, "Wow this is potential." But back then, again 5 or 6 years ago the stack was very immature. There was a lot of things you needed to figure out. Like the observability, the developer environment. There's a whole bunch of stuff that wasn't quite right. So it's something that we shared to our peers across the organization. We talked about it. We really started to kind of think, "Well this is interesting, this idea of serverless or manage servers." It started to really change how we thought and it really started to make the concept of a cloud native application very real. Cause we started to think of cloud native architecture loaded into application architecture. And that started to really flip how we thought. So it's just been a real journey these past couple of years. And a big thing for me is we started with engineers thinking of cloud as a mindset not necessarily as a platform. That opened the door to a lot of possibilities. >> Yeah, that's really interesting that you said that. Often times we say cloud is an operational model not a physical location. Are you using multiple clouds today? >> Yes, we probably tend to have a multi cloud strategy. And really to be very clear, serverless for us it's not just functions of service. Its not saying, "We're just using kind of something like Lambda." It's really about that idea using managed service. Thinking about evolution of architecture. How can we kind of try and cut out anything that is actually not differentiating? There's a great term which I always like is the stack policy is sometimes a technology companies we get obsessed by the stack. We think that the piece near the customer is quite easy. But think from the technology perspective we need to think about, we can deliver the most value by making the customer experience kind of best. And it can be even ramp the stack from whoever we need. >> Yeah, no, its a fascinating discussion. I've seen even today. You say serverless functions as a service. A lot of it is I don't want the developer to have to think about those underlying layer. Which reminds me of the discussion we've been having about platform as a service for more than a decade but PaaS was supposed to be platform independent. So I could have my code where ever it goes. Serverless today, right now we've talked about Lambda, Amazon there's certain things that I could only do on Amazon. There are discussions and working groups and the cloud data computing foundation. Working on how we can do serverless functions as a service that could expand between multiple clouds or use the same sort of code. So how do you look at that space? You talk about cloud native. How do you make sure that you're leveraging the technologies of the specific cloud but I guess I'll throw out not being locked into any one provider? >> I think about it for me it starts with the empowerment of the engineering team. We talk about a serverless first strategy that means that we've got the capability to build anything you need to. But to rent where you can. We had a fascinating story one of our best stories is a company called Workgrid. Workgrid Software is one of the companies that we spun out of Liberty Mutual. That was a project that we had an internal digital assistant that we built with some of our teams, it'd be back 4, 5 years ago. And our CEO James McGlannan decided to fund that as a kind of a startup. They broke off around 3 years ago and that initial team had 4 people in that engineering team. So they kind of decided that they would be serverless first in their approach. They didn't have time to think about operability or rights for portability. They had to realize business value really quickly. So they took a evolutionary architectural approach which meant they kept incrementing and iterating delivering value where possible. What's the next best thing that they can build to deliver value to the customer? So when you think in that regard, if you ever come to an Amazon of a grid, no one way doors, keep the two way doors. Don't lock yourself into anything. Make decisions that you can always build upon. So with that kind of constant iterative work our teams and that's serverless first strategy. It means that when you do rent the service if you need to change to another service it's just a matter of if you've your boundaries set up practically, it's very easy to get out of that. You dig yourself in deep to something, that's the difference. So I think there's an engineering mindset and culture that we certainly have proudness in our teams. But they kind of go fast, focus on business value and try and be sort cloud native in their outlook. >> Excellent, yeah, I just heard Andy Jassy in the AWS Summit online talking about those one way door. So sounds like from your standpoint, serverless is a two-way door for architecting in your mindset? >> Absolutely, I mean I think really for me it brings architecture back into the team. It's one of the really nice things is if your team use managed services that focus is on business value. If our infrastructure is set up to support that type of team then you have minimal hand offs within the team. Through the single team, its their job to create value, engineer the solution, make sure the security is good enough, build the operation, the visibility it's all contained within one team. We get a huge responsibility from that one team. As an engineer that is super powerful, super huge autonomy. So we can talk with the serverless engineer and for me it's been absolutely fascinating to see teams come into this environment and once they understand that event driven way of creating their systems. And I use the words systems rather than applications to create event driven systems they're constantly building upon. It's just fascinating to see where they go. You start to see the creativity and innovation of the engineers. So its truly unbelievable to watch. They're really very cool. >> Dave, I'm curious when you look at the application portfolio that your team manages, how do you decide what goes serverless? Is it new development all goes serverless? Has there been a migration? How do you look at the overall application portfolio that you have? >> It kind of depends I suppose on, I'm not going to sit here and say that we're going to refactor everything to serverless. I think when you do a migration there's usually six or seven paths you can go down and you do what's best for the business. But for new development, it's definitely interesting we haven't found many used cases that are really a bad fit. It's a spectrum we may decide what different servers to use. We built a system last year which was absolutely fascinating to see. It's like a a financial aggregation system where we do a lot of our accounting. So it was kind of serverless ETL, we're trying to do like an end of month batch system to detect a lot accounts from different countries and kind of pipe them into a kind of general ledger. Not something I would've thought about for serverless, to be honest. But then when you think about it and some of our engineering leads they have put this together. They can design this fantastic system using serverless workflows. Cause you're taking lots of various different types of data orchestrated in a single destination. And we put live in that this year and I think one of the monthly ends that they recently ran I think they ran something like 100 million transactions. Relatively low cost and of course being a month end system the rest of the months there's zero cost. You don't pay for idle. We only actually pay for wireless roaming in that month end process for maybe like FDRs or something. >> Dave, you talked about the early days 2014 when Lambda was announced, re:Invent, when you first started using it in the first year or so. There's the maturity of that ecosystem solutions set. Where do you see things now? What's working well? What's on your wishlist? Kind of mature or increase overall functionality to help? >> I think that the developer environment and developer experience is a big part. One of the key messages in trying to kind of get into our culture is code is a liability. It's not an asset. If you have a bunch of engineers writing lots of code that in fact is a liability. There's no business asset in that. The asset is in the system that you create. Trying to get engineers into the mindset to write less code and they actually engineer systems. So one of the things we've been trying to do is maybe using patterns as building blocks. People became kind of like a Lego building block way of creating their systems. Piecing somethings like CDK code development kit patterns. Using the world architect process to make sure that teams are looking after their cost, their security, their performance, their liability, and their kind of optimizations. Some of those things are really important in that whole ownership of an operational view of their systems. And also even things like observability. When you create a system with a lot of events laying around it starts getting complex. But then if you do it correctly you can start to layer on well, what better insights can we build on top of the system? So it's really opening up teams a different way of working. And then of course there's lots of operational challenges when you get into more complex environment. So as we often say, it's not easier, different, built difficulty building systems, but it's different, that's what's definitely easier but better. >> All right, how about anything that you're looking out towards the future? You talked about the early days when you look at these and while you're not necessarily throwing the latest shiny thing into production, there's that curiosity. So what's exciting you now? Anything else kind of looking forward that you prepare? >> I think one of the fantastic success stories we've had is with a project we call Virtual Assistant. And really to answer your question, its about how teams can properly work at MVP. So, one of the things that we really find fascinating is when you put a good engineering team. And I mean a team who you're really solid engineers you then layer on the cloud and security best practices and verification. We then put them in a coded serverless environment with real business problem. They then create a MVP. You're virtual assistant in, raises an MVP. So if you call into a call center and you have a fairly straightforward request, like if you have an auto claim you might say, "Well when can I pick up my ramp bill?" If you already done your claim. We have an NLP a natural language assistant that can help you with that conversation. So when you start with an MVP system like that you can start them off at a fairly small traffic, until you actually tune that until it's kind of perfect. And then you gradually scale up and add on other data driven potential AI services, integrations to that. So I think when you start to take the MVP approach, and have a very, very novel solution see what that's like in the wild and then start to scale out. We scale that system for taking maybe 30 calls maybe taking about a quarter on your calls. It's fantastic how you can start to scale these system up. Well I think what I'm really looking for is more kind of support to see how we can you know, it's the art of the possible. How can we use this skillset and this serverless mindset to create really fascinating business applications. Because when you get under that kind of creative conversation with business partners, I mean they don't want to hear about Lambda or events or observability. They want to say, "Well, what can I do with AI? What can I do with Voice, what can I do with Vision?" So we start to open up really fantastic conversations like that. So I'd like to see more of that, but in a creative product development. >> Excellent, well yeah Dave, so important that you brought back as to how IT in the business. Working together, it's not about the technical widget or knobs or anything. But the services and the value that ultimately you can provide for the business and the impact that has on your ultimate end customer. All right, Dave, thanks so much. Real pleasure having a chat with you. >> Thanks Stu really appreciate it, thank you. >> All right, be sure to check out theCUBE.net. Lots of backgrounds, if you go hit the search, you can actually type serverless, find out more about what we've been covering as well as what events we will be at in the future. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCube. (gentle music)