>> Narrator: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE!
Covering GitLab Commit 2020.
Brought to you by GitLab.
>> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage
of GitLab Commit 2020.
We're here in San Francisco.
It's a little bit chilly but my first guests on the program
are used to the weather
'cause they are coming to us from Wisconsin.
Both from Northwestern Mutual,
sitting to my left here is Kyle Persohn,
who is a senior engineer
and sitting to his left is Sean Corkum,
who is also a senior engineer.
Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us.
>> Both: Thanks for having us.
>> We thought, both of us coming from colder climates
that maybe coming to San Francisco would be a little warmer.
But they have hand warmers,
they have warm drinks and it is the warmth
of the community that will warm our innards I'm sure, right?
>> There's a sign out there that says "Get warm"
so that's what we're here to do.
>> All right, Kyle let's start with you.
Northwestern Mutual,
I think most people are familiar with the organization
but give us a little bit of how people should think
of Northwestern Mutual in 2020 and your roles.
>> Yeah, so obviously we are a large insurance company
but also into financial services and products
and we're really trying to become more
of a digital company as well.
We think that that's going to be
a differentiator in the market place.
Having apps that our customers can interact with,
trying to speed up underwriting, things like that.
So we're really just trying to be
a technology company as much of an insurance company.
>> Okay, and Sean I understand that you are on the same
team as Kyle helping along with that digital transformation
that's been all the buzz for the last couple of years.
>> Yeah he can't get rid of me.
We flew 1200 miles and I'm still sitting next to him.
But yeah, at Northwestern Mutual,
I mean going back a number of years now,
the company started down this path of doing
a digital transformation where we wanted to be
a software company that is providing financial servicing,
financial stability for our clients.
So it was a big shift that we started.
We knew we needed to modernize everything,
so we started down that path, and that's how we ended up.
>> So Kyle, maybe if you can,
when did GitLab enter the picture?
What was the initial use case and let's go from there.
>> Yeah, it was before my time.
Sean's been there along for most of the ride,
but yeah it's been several years,
and it's been starting out with SCM moving into CI
and then adopted to a standard journey that you
hear about even in the keynote today,
that's pretty much how we charted our course.
>> Okay, so Sean you've been there since
the beginning of the GitLab usage?
>> Pretty much, it showed up a couple months
before I got there.
But going back to early, mid 2015,
we had more of a pilot group of engineers
that were starting out to get us down this path
to where we wanted to go.
And they needed a new tool,
something that worked better
than what we currently had at NM.
And they settled on GitLab 'cause it provided
one, being open source was a huge selling point for us,
and it was just ever-growing, so it allowed our developers
to really get going and get going much faster.
>> Okay, great, and in the keynote, Kyle,
they were talking about how it's not just about
the dev, the sec, and the ops,
but really in allowing everybody into the same tooling,
even marketing and finance,
what's the breadth of the organization,
is it mostly dev, is it dev and ops,
does security, who's involved in using this tooling?
>> It's everybody, we're figuring out our,
everyone's kind of got their own spin on things,
so we're in that classic position where,
I think we have the tooling sprawl
that everyone talks about, and we're constantly evaluating,
how does GitLab fit into that picture,
what do we bolt on, we have the luxury of being able
to integrate with other things as well,
but then certainly if we can get an economy of scale,
where we can just use GitLab
to provide that seamless interface,
that's something we always looked to do, too.
>> All right, so Sean, my understanding is,
NM's also using Kubernetes,
and that's something that you're involved in,
so why don't you bring us in,
people sometimes get misconstrued as to
the scope and the purpose of Kubernetes,
we've been at the KubeCon CloudNativeCon
for a number of years, but why don't you
set the stage for us and kind of walk us through
the what and the why of Kubernetes?
>> Yeah, for us at least, being able to leverage something
like Kubernetes, which when you really back out
and do the 10,000 foot view,
it's container management,
and being able to go into a more modern architecture,
we're leveraging containers for
pretty much whatever we can,
or at least what makes sense.
And that's kind of how we started down the path
with GitLab moving into Kubernetes,
we were trying to figure out where we want to go,
so let's not just push the boat out a little,
let's dropkick the boat off the end of the pier
and see where we end up.
So we started working down that path
of deploying GitLab into Kubernetes,
'cause it allowed us to easily expand
and make the application highly available,
so even if some AZs go down in AWS,
which knock on wood, never happens,
we're still good to go, our users wouldn't even notice.
>> Okay, so you mentioned AWS, is that your primary cloud,
your only cloud, what is your cloud situation?
>> Yeah, that's Northwestern Mutual's public cloud.
>> Okay, great, and speak a little bit to,
Amazon does have plenty of its own tooling,
maybe a little bit about how GitLab and Amazon,
how those fit together for you.
>> Well, I mean we use GitLab's CI specifically
to be able to provision different services and whatnot
that we need, as long as they fit
within our security requirements,
and everything we do we get vetted out
through our internal processes,
but it's really allowed our developers
to move forward so much faster,
it's kind of, gone are the days of
"Let me fill out a request for x, y, z,"
and wait two weeks as it goes through somebody's
work queue and they eventually get around to it.
Allowing our developers to just do their commits,
get their peer review, and just deploy and provision
right away, allows us to get our applications to market
just so much faster than even a few years ago.
>> All right, so Kyle, the two of you are presenting here
at the show, we love, we heard GitLab talking on stages,
customers don't just use it, they commit,
they feed back in, and they speak at the show,
so maybe speak a little bit of
NM's involvement as to, are you committing code,
and what are you speaking about?
>> So we're here to speak about our journey on Kubernetes,
Sean's covering the application side,
I'm going to talk about our dabble in Kubernetes CI,
so we're really looking for efficiencies, I guess,
and density, that's a primary driver behind trying to
explore the trail, but also one of the things
I'll talk about in the talk is boosting our security
posture using Kubernetes.
So a lot of times people are using API keys,
they're getting stale and not being rotated,
we can do some neat things with Kubernetes
and its native IM offerings
to boost our security posture by moving towards
role-based access, and getting those credentials
that are rotating and providing us non-stale
sort of authentication credentials, things like that.
>> Sean?
>> That pretty much covers it.
I mean beyond the CI, being able to run
GitLab itself within Kube,
and having the different components
broken out were a lot, it's enabling us to
limit any kind of attack plane that could exist,
you have to get through a lot to even get to it.
So it's really just been a huge plus for us.
>> Okay, I'd love to hear,
both of you have been to these events
a number of times, you're speaking at the event,
what's the value of coming to GitLab Commit?
>> I mean for me it's a huge networking thing,
and being able to relay our experiences
that we've gone through to other people
that are out in the community.
I mean I know lots, everyone wants to see,
what can you do in Kubernetes,
and here's some of the things that we've done,
here's some of the things that worked, that didn't work,
we would recommend going this kind of route
if we were to start it over again,
and beyond that, meeting people
from all over the world, we were talking with
some gentleman, Nico from White Duck, who's from Germany.
It's not something you get to do
face to face all the time.
>> All right, Sean, can you share with your audience
any of those "If we could do it over again
"we'd change something," is it a technical piece, or?
>> Don't use EFS for your Git repo data.
It will not end well for you.
>> Good takeaway, yeah.
>> All right, Kyle, how about you,
you've been to a number of these shows,
is it the networking piece,
or what else, what for you personally,
and for NM, brings you back?
>> Yeah, networking's a big thing,
I think it's also getting feedback
on what we're doing, does it make sense?
Just like GitLab is throwing things out there early,
trying to tighten up that contribution loop,
we want to get our ideas out there,
and this is an opportunity for people
to ask questions about our presentation,
if maybe we're off in the wrong direction,
maybe we can get that steered back on course,
we're just really here to get the feedback.
>> Yeah, I always love talking to people
in the financial industry and you talk about open source.
If you went back five years ago,
you'd probably get a little bit of sideways looks
as to "Wait, you're doing what?"
Are we past that, do you feel, are most people
really understanding where we are with cloud
and open source in general that,
it makes perfect sense for a financial institution
to be part of it?
>> Yeah, I'd say at NM, we've finally gotten
past that curve, and now we're trying
to make it even easier for our internal developers
to easier participate and open source
their internal products
and contribute more to the community.
We've completely done an about face
from probably 15 years ago,
where it was open source "You want to do what?"
to "Yeah, let's go, how can we make things better?"
It's all about our customers, so we want to make sure
we create the best product and experience for them.
>> That's awesome.
>> There's still some barriers there,
I mean it's all about managing risk, right,
so we have to do things diligently
and make sure that your bases are covered,
and so it's not like it can be a free for all,
we have to do our due diligence,
but we love to contribute and we love to get
as out there as we can.
>> All right, well Kyle and Sean, thanks so much
for sharing with our audience, best of luck
with your presentations,
and have a great time at the show.
>> Thank you. >> Yeah, thank you so much.
>> All right, thank you to NM for joining us,
I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE.
(techno music)