- Hello and welcome to Community Chats.
I'm Aley Hammer,
and today we're interviewing Roger Schobben,
the Cloud Executive from NAB.
Roger, thank you so much for joining us today.
NAB is a brand that obviously needs no introduction
and many of us are well aware
of NAB's digital transformation journey.
But, what would be great would be if you could dive deep
into the inner workings of the NAB cloud team.
And to begin, I guess, tell us a little bit about yourself
and your team.
- Yeah, sure and thank you Aley.
Thanks so much for having me on the channel.
So I describe myself as an infrastructure guy.
I love designing, building and deploying infrastructure,
especially at scale and the organizations
that support these infrastructures.
And whether that's in
data centers, networking, e-commerce or cloud,
doesn't really matter.
So I worked most of my life in the Netherlands.
I started, really I spent a lot of time
at one of the largest cable operator offering television,
internet, and telephony service to millions of subscribers
in the country.
I then moved to booking.com, the online travel agents,
looking after data center networks and cloud.
And most recently in 2019, I had the pleasure
of leading NAB's cloud organization here in Australia.
And the cloud team basically looks after everything
that's related to the cloud platforms at NAB.
And we enable the business to run the applications
that support our colleagues and our customers.
When I came, so NAB started
and it's been running public cloud since 2012
with our first public facing workload,
but the things got really serious.
About four years ago, in 2018 and since that time,
we are now running more than 50% of our applications
on public cloud, including very critical applications
like internet banking.
So we're very serious about public clouds.
- What a colorful career, and after four years of running
and managing so many critical applications on the cloud,
how do you actually manage your environment
at such a large scale?
- Yeah, I think I love the scalability topic.
I think you can look at that
both from a technical perspective
and an organization or people perspective.
So I'll try and cover both.
But from a technology perspective,
I believe that to ensure you can scale it's really,
standardization is your friend and complexity is your enemy.
Because, it's really important that you have to automate,
and it's super hard to automate complexity.
So, the more simplicity and standardization
that you can drive the easier it becomes.
Just be deploying multiple units off of the same.
You can call that horizontal scaling, if you will,
as opposed to vertical scaling
where you're just adding more power,
but you'll hit ceilings.
And that's definitely something you need to avoid
when it comes to scalability.
And then it's just a matter of distributing the traffic
or load over these units.
And to make that more concrete in AWS terminology,
we are deploying one application per landing zone
or per AWS account,
and we don't put them all into one account.
And that really helps with scalability.
Now, on the organizational and the people side,
I think, sort of the same applies.
We try and organize also in smaller units or teams,
you will be familiar with the two pizza acronym
or the two pizza team acronym or squads.
And we try and do the same with very autonomous teams
that can make decisions on their own
and achieve a high velocity
without too many dependencies on others.
But I think automation plays a key role
to reduce human efforts and avoid mistakes,
but it all comes, you're nothing without your people.
So I think we've been pretty successful
on the people side.
We have a program that we initiated also
about four years ago called the NAB Cloud Guild
where we heavily invest in maintaining
and growing the skills of our colleagues
through formalized training, informal training,
communities of practice, et cetera.
So I think all of these are really important elements
to ensure that we can continue to achieve scale.
- Well Roger, I've definitely noticed
that you guys at NAB take really good care of your staff
and all the training.
They're really lucky that you invest this much.
So, what I wanna know as well is, your level of maturity
and scale, how do you optimize your environment
to get the best price and performance out of AWS?
'Cause you guys do so much on the platform.
So really interested, how you optimize the environment.
- Yeah, great question.
And a couple of things there.
I think we're definitely trying to optimize costs.
One of the things we do is we have a fin ops team
that is constantly on the hunt
for optimization opportunities across our cloud,
whether that's on rightsizing or shutting down temporarily
or removing resources that are not used.
And then with that hunt, with the information they find,
we provide actionable insights to various groups
in the banks, or in the bank.
One of them is the application teams
and the other is technology senior management.
So as an example, on the application teams,
we provide weekly insights on optimization opportunities
that they can, connection, for example,
go from this machine type
to that machine type based on CPU, disc, I/O, et cetera.
And on the management level, we provide information
on how many rightsizing
or how many optimization opportunities we have identified
within their domains.
And then we also track how we are implementing
those opportunities.
So, it's really a very data-driven transparent approach
that, and with that, we try
and derive the right outcomes.
Next to that, we're promoting (indistinct),
obviously in our non production environments,
but also in production,
the Cloud Guild I mentioned earlier,
there's an education piece as well on cost
and the capabilities and the opportunities
that are there.
And lastly I'd say, our cloud platform teams,
they design, build, operate the landing zones
that we offer to our application teams.
So a lot of the heavy lifting is already done centrally,
and the application teams can really focus
on the application.
So that helps us deliver in a pretty efficient way as well.
- Thank you so much.
And Roger, as part of your journey to the cloud,
how have you evolved your core infrastructure
over the last few years?
For example, what I wanna know about
is your network environment.
- Obviously that's evolved quite a bit
and it's still evolving.
Where, four years ago, most of our applications
ran in the data centers
and the cloud was just an external thing
where a few of the applications lived.
And as an example there, connectivity
on cloud actually used to come back to data center
and then go back out to the cloud, which doesn't really,
it didn't really scale very well.
So I think the horizontal scaling that I mentioned early,
we've had to invest.
Now we saw some bottlenecks coming up.
So we were proactive luckily
and could resolve these prior to that becoming an issue,
but we're still transforming our network core.
But also we've implemented the services
like AMS Transit Gateway to really help us scale
and keep the traffic on cloud that needs to stay on cloud.
And we're in the middle of implementing AMS, sorry,
AWS Network Firewall.
- Well, it's crazy to think about how far you've come
just in such a short amount of time
and how much you've done in the cloud.
So, looking ahead into 2022,
and it sounds crazy saying that,
just fresh into the new year,
but what are some of the key areas
of focus for your team in 2022?
- Yeah, I think we will clearly continue
to focus on efficiency.
And that will come in many forms,
whether that's implementing new cloud services
on the platform that are more cost efficient,
to rightsizing our management opportunities
that we see automation.
I think the area that I'm most excited about is talent.
You know, by the end of February,
we'll have 300 new colleagues joining us
in a form of interns, graduates,
people returning from career breaks
and then you have diverse employees as well.
And, I'm really excited about providing career opportunities
and helping them with these opportunities
to develop a career in technology at NAB.
Actually, NAB is the largest intern employer
in technology in Australia.
So really excited about that.
- That is amazing.
I've a huge smile on my face.
'Cause if you say you're hiring 300 people,
they're all gonna go through that Cloud Guild
that you were talking about.
So this is so exciting.
You guys have done such an incredible job.
I cannot wait to continue working with you,
watching your journey.
And Roger, it was such a pleasure speaking to you today.
So, if anyone does have any questions for Roger or myself,
please pop them in the comment section below,
and we'll get back to you.
Thank you so much Roger.
- Thank you so much Aley.
Appreciate it.