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>> Good afternoon and welcome back to Las Vegas.
You're watching theCUBE's coverage of AWS 2021.
My name is Dave Vellante.
theCUBE goes out to the events.
We extract the signal from the noise.
Very few physical events this year
doing a lot of hybrid stuff.
It's great to be back in hybrid event...
Physical event land, 25,000 people here.
Probably a little few more registered than that.
And then on the periphery,
got to be another at least 10,000 people that came in,
flew in and out, see what's happening.
A bunch of VCs, checking things out,
a few parties last night and so forth.
A lot of action here.
It's like re:Invent is back.
Matt Coulter is here.
He's a technical architect at Liberty Mutual.
Matt, thanks for flying in from Belfast.
Good to see ya.
>> Dave, and thanks for having me today.
>> Pleasure. So what's your role as a technical architect?
Maybe describe that, we'll get into a little bit.
>> Yeah so I am here to empower
and enable our developers across the globe
to rapidly deliver business value
and solve problems for our customers
in a well-architected way that doesn't introduce problems
or risks, you know, later down the line.
So instead of thinking of me as someone
who directly every day, build software,
I try to create the environment
where other people can rapidly build software.
>> That's, you know, it's interesting.
because you're a developer, right?
You can use like, "Hey I code."
That's what normally you would say
but you're actually creating frameworks
and business model so that others can learn,
teach them how to fish, so we speak.
>> Yeah because I can only scale, there's a certain amount.
Whereas if I can teach, there's 5,000 people
in Liberty Mutual's tech organization.
So if I can teach the 5,000 to be 5% better,
it's way more than me even if I 10Xed
>> When did you first touch the Cloud?
>> Personally, it would have been four/five years ago.
That's when I started in the Cloud.
>> What was that experience like for you?
>> Oh, it was hard.
It was very different to anything
that we'd done in the past.
So it's because you...
Traditionally, you would have just written
your small piece of code.
You would have had a big application that was out there,
it had been out there maybe 20 years, it was deployed,
and you were just adding a couple of lines.
Whereas when you start putting stuff into the Cloud,
it's out there.
It's on the internet for anyone there
to try and hack or try to get into.
It was a bit overwhelming
the amount that you needed to learn.
So it was-
>> Was it worth it?
>> Oh yeah. Completely. (laughing)
So that's the thing,
that I would never go back to the way we did things before.
And that's why I'm so passionate, enthusiastic
about the stuff I've been doing.
Because to me, the amount of benefits you can get,
like now we can deliver thing.
We have teams going out there
and doing discovery and framing with the business.
And they're pushing well-architected products
three days later into production.
That was unheard of before, you know, this year.
>> Yeah. So you were part of Werner's keynote this morning.
Of course that's always one of the keynotes
that's most anticipated at re:Invent.
It's on the sort of last day.
He's awesome.
This is you know, 10th year of re:Invent.
He sort of did a look back.
He started out (chuckles) he's just a cool guy
and very passionate.
But talk about what your role was in the keynote.
>> Yeah so I had a section towards the end of the keynote,
and I was to talk about
Liberty Mutual's serverless first journey.
I actually went through from 2014
through to the current day
of all the major Cloud milestones that we've hit.
And I talked through some of the impact
it's had on our business
and the impact it's had on our developers.
And yeah it's just been this incredible journey where
as I said, it was hard at the start.
So we had to spark this culture within our company
that we were going to empower and enable our developers
and we were going to get them excited about doing this.
And that's why we needed to make it safe.
So there was a lot of work went down at the start
to make the Cloud safe for our developers to experiment.
And then the past two years
have been known that it's safe, okay?
Let's see what it can do. Let's go.
>> Yeah so Liberty Mutual has been around many many years,
Boston-based, you know, East Coast-based, my home city.
I don't live in Boston but I consider it my city.
And so talk about your business a little bit
because you're an established company.
I don't know, probably a hundred years old, right?
Any all other newbies nipping at your business, right?
Coming in with low-cost products.
Maybe not bringing as much protection as you dig into it.
But regardless, you've got to compete with them technically.
So what are some of the drivers in your business
and how are you using the Cloud
to sort of defend your tariff and grow?
>> Yeah so first of all, we're 109 years old.
(laughing)
Yeah. So absolutely,
there's an entire sure in SureTech market
of people here gunning for the big Liberty Mutual
because we've been here for so long.
And our whole thing is we're focused on our customers.
So we want to be there for people in their time of need.
Because at a point in time whenever you need insurance,
typically something is going wrong.
And that's why we're building innovative solutions
like a serverless call center we built,
that after natural disaster,
it can automatically process claims
in less than four minutes.
So instead of having to wait on hold for maybe an hour,
you can just text or pick up the phone,
and four minutes later your claims are through.
And that's we're using technology
always focused on the customer.
>> That's unbelievable.
Think about that experience, to me.
I mean I've filed claims before and it's,
it's kind of time consuming.
And you're saying you've compressed that to minutes?
Days, weeks, you know,
and now you've compressed that to minutes?
>> Yeah.
>> Tell us more about how you did that.
>> And that's because it's a fully serverless solution
that was built.
So it doesn't require like people to scale.
It can scale to whatever number of our customers need
to make a claim at that point
because that would typically be the bottleneck
if there's some kind of natural disaster.
So that means that if something happens
we can just switch it on.
And customers can choose not to use it.
You can always choose to say I want to speak to a person.
But now with this technology, we can just make it easy
and just go.
Everything, all the information we know in the back end,
we just use it and actually make things better for you.
>> You're talking about the impact that it had
on your business and developers.
So how do you quantify that?
Maybe start with the business.
Maybe share some ways in which you look at that measure.
>> Yeah, so I mean,
in terms of how we measure the impact of the Cloud
on our business,
we're always looking at our profitability
and we're always looking, as I say, at our customers.
And ideally, I want our Cloud bill to go down
as our number of customers goes up
because that's why we're using the serverless fast mindset,
we call it.
We don't want to build anything we don't have to build.
We want to take the best that's out there
and just piece it together
and produce these products for our customers.
So yeah, that's having an impact on our business
because now developers aren't spending weeks, months, years
doing all this configuration.
And they can actually sit down with the business
and understand how we write insurance.
So now we can start being innovative with our products
and talking about the real business
instead of everything else.
>> When you say you want your Cloud bill to go down,
you know,
it reminds me like in the old days of IT budgeting, right?
It was always slash, do more with less cut, cut, cut, right?
And it was kind of going in cycles.
But with the Cloud a lot of customers that I talk to,
they were like,
might be going down as a percentage of revenues
but actually it might be going up
as you launch more projects because they're driving revenue.
There's a tighter tie between revenue and Cloud bill.
How do you look at that?
>> Yeah. So I mean, with every project,
you have to look at the worth-based development often
and whether or not it's going to hold this away in the market.
And the key thing is with the serverless products
that are being released now,
they cost pennies if they're low scale.
So you can actually launch a new product into the market
and it maybe only cost you $20
to see if that thing would fit in the market.
So by the time you're getting into the big bills
you know whether or not you've got a market fit
and you can decide whether you want to pivot.
>> Oh wow. So you you've compressed,
that's another business metric.
You've compressed the time
to get certainty around product market fit, right?
Which is huge because you really can't go to market
until you have product market fit (laughing)
>> Exactly. You have to be.
Thoroughly understand if it's going to work.
>> Right because if you go to the market
and you've got 50% churn.
(laughing)
Well, you don't want to be worried about the go-to market.
You got to get back to the product so you can test that
and you can generate.
>> So that's why, yeah,
As I said, we have developers who can go out
and do discovery and framing on a potential product
and deliver it three days later which (chuckles)
>> How has the Cloud effected developer satisfaction
or passion?
I guess it's...
I mean we're in AWS Cloud.
Our developers, we tell them
"Okay, you got to go back on-prem."
They would say, "I quit."
(laughing)
How has it affected their lives?
>> Yeah it's completely there for them, it's way better.
So now we have way more ownership
over any, you know, of everything we ever did.
So it feels like you're truly a part of Liberty Mutual
and you're solving Liberty's problems now.
Because it's not a case of like,
"Okay, let's put in a request to stand up a server,
it's going to take six months.
And then let's do some big long acquisition."
It's a case of like,
"Let's actually get done into the nitty gritty
of what we going to build."
And that's-
>> How do you use the Cloud developer kit?
Maybe you could talk about that.
I mean, explain what it is. It's a framework.
But explain from your perspective.
>> Yeah so the Cloud typically, it started off,
and lot of it was done by Cloud infrastructure engineers
who created these big YAML files.
That's how they defined all the stuff
that's going to be deployed.
But that's not typically the development language
that most developers use.
The CDK is in like Java, TypeScript, .NET, Python.
The language is developers ready known love.
And it means that they can use everything they already know
from all of their previous development experience
and bring it to the Cloud.
And you see some benefits like, you get,
I talked about this morning,
a 1500 line YAML file was reduced to 14 lines of TypeScript.
And that's what we're talking about
with the cognitive difference for a developer
using CDK versus anything else.
>> Cognitive abstraction,
>> Right? >> Yeah.
And so it just simplifies your living
and you spend more time doing cool stuff.
>> Yeah we can write an abstraction
for our specific needs once.
And then everybody can use that abstraction.
And if we want to make a change and make it better,
everyone benefits instead of everybody
doing the same thing all the time.
>> So for people who are unfamiliar, what do you need?
You need an AWS account, obviously.
You got to get a command-line interface, I would imagine.
maybe some Node.js often running, or is it-
>> Yeah. So that's it.
You need an AWS account, and then you need to install CDK,
which is from Node Package Manager.
And then from there,
it depends on which way you want to start.
You could use my project CDK patterns,
has a whole ray of working patterns
that you can clone among commands.
You just have to type,
like one command you've got a pattern, and then CDK deploy.
And you'll have something working.
>> Okay so what do you do day-to-day?
You sort of,
you evangelize folks to come in and get trained?
Is there just like a backlog of people that want your time?
How do you manage that?
>> So I try to be the place that I'm needed the most
based on impact of the business.
And that's why I try to go in.
Liberty split up into different areas
and I try to go into those areas,
understand where they are versus where they need to be.
And then if I can do that across everywhere,
you can see the common thesis.
And then I can see where I can have the most impact
across the board instead of focusing on one micro place.
So there's a variety of tools and techniques
that I would do, you know, to go through that
but that's the crux of it.
>> So you look at your business across the portfolio,
so you have portfolio view.
And then you do a gap analysis essentially,
say "Okay, where can I approach this framework
and technology from a developer standpoint, add value?
>> Yeah like I could go into every single team
with every single project,
draw it all out and like, what we call Wardley map,
and then you can draw a line
and then say "Everything blue in this line
is undifferentiated, heavy-lifted.
I want you to migrate that.
And here's how you're going to do it
I've already built the tools for that."
And that's how we can drive those conversations.
>> So, you know, it's funny,
I spent a lot of time in the insurance business
not in the business
but consulting with heads of application development
and looking at portfolios.
And you know, they did their thing.
But you know, a lot of people sort of question,
"Can developers in an insurance company
actually become cool Cloud native developers?"
You're doing it, right?
So that's going to be an amazing transformation
for your colleagues and your industry.
And it's happening as we look around here (indistinct)
>> And that's the thing, in Liberty I'm not the only one.
So there's Tommy Gloklin, he's an AWS hero,
and there's Diali Mikan, who's an AWS hero.
And Diali is in Workgrid
but we're still all the same family.
>> So what does it mean to be an AWS hero?
>> Yeah so this is something that AWS
has to offer you to join.
So basically, it's about impacting the community.
It's not...
There's not like a checklist of items
you can go through and you're hero.
It's you have to be nominated internally through AWS,
and then you have to have the right intentions.
And yeah, just follow through.
>> Dave: That's awesome.
Yeah so our producer, Lynette,
is looking for an Irish limerick.
You know, every, say I'm half Irish
is through my marriage.
Dad, you didn't know that, did you?
And every year we have a St Patrick's Day party
and my daughter comes up with limericks.
So I don't know, if you have one that you want to share.
If you don't, that's fine.
>> I have no limericks for now. I'm so sorry.
(laughing)
>> There once was a producer from, where are you from?
(laughing)
So where do you want to take this, Matt?
What's your future look like with this program?
>> So right now, today,
I actually launched a book called the CDK book.
>> Dave: Really? Awesome. >> Yeah
So me and three other heroes got together
and put everything we know about CDK
and distilled it into one book.
But the...
I mean there's two sides, there's inside Liberty.
The goal as I've mentioned is to get our developers
to the point that they're talking
about real insurance problems rather than tech.
And then outside Liberty in the community
the goal is things like CDK Day,
which is a global conference that I created and run.
And I want to just grow those
farther and farther throughout the world
so that eventually we can start learning
you know, cross business, cross market, cross the main
instead of just internally one company.
>> It's impressive how tuned in you are to the business.
Do you feel like the Cloud almost forces that alignment?
>> It does. It definitely does.
Because when you move quickly,
you need to understand what you're doing.
You can't bluff almost, you know.
Like everything you're building
you're demonstrating that every two weeks or faster.
So you need to know the business to do it.
>> Well, Matt, congratulations on all the great work
that you've done
and the keynote this morning.
You know, true tech hero.
We really appreciate your time coming in theCUBE.
>> Thank you, Dave, for having me.
>> Our pleasure. And thank you for watching.
This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE at AWS re:Invent.
We are the leader global tech coverage.
We'll be right back.
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