About Gillian Armstrong and Mark McCann

Gillian works as a Solutions Architect at Liberty Information Technologies. Her team is focused on thinking about big problems, and working out how to solve them using innovative technology in interesting new ways. At the moment she is working on Artificial Intelligence, with a particular focus on Conversational AI design and development. She has more than a decade’s worth of experience in many technologies across the full stack, and loves being a software engineer as it allows her not just to think up big ideas, but also to make them a reality.

Mark is an Architect at Liberty Information Technology that has been developing software and solutions for Liberty Mutual for nearly 20 years. He is currently working on making "Business idea to production in minutes" a reality. Mark holds several AWS Cloud Certifications and has a vast amount of experience with microservices, event-driven architecture, Docker, AWS, and other emerging cloud technologies.

• Gillian Twitter: @virtualgill
• Gillian Web: virtualgill.io
• Mark Twitter: @markmccann
• Liberty IT: liberty-it.co.uk

Transcript

Jeremy: Hi, everyone. I'm Jeremy Daly, and you're listening to Serverless Chats. This week, I'm chatting with Gillian Armstrong and Mark McCann. Hi, Gillian and Mark. Thanks for being here.

Gillian: Hi. Thanks for having us.

Mark: Hello.

Jeremy: So both of you work on the team at Liberty Information Technology, which is a part of Liberty Mutual Group. So Liberty Mutual, if people don't know 100-year-old insurance company, one of the largest here in the US - you have, what - 30 countries you work with, 50,000 employees, something crazy like that. So let's start with Gillian. You’re a Solutions Architect there. Why don't you give us your background, a little bit more about what you do?

Gillian: Sure. So I have worked across a lot of the areas in Liberty, including our emerging tech space, where I was first able to work on some completely serverless-first projects. This year, I’ve been working with the teams in our digital ecommerce space in Boston, looking at serverless, looking at AI, and I've just moved to our Data and Analytics unit. I definitely have a big focus on driving the serverless mindset in the company and also trying to get involved in the serverless community as well. And I'm also looking at AI sort of from an engineering and serverless perspective. So how far can we get using the managed services? How do we bring it into a large enterprise systems? Because, as you said, Liberty Mutual is a huge company.

Jeremy: Great. All right, Mark, what about you? You're an Architect there. Why don't you tell us about yourself?

Mark: Yeah, I’m an Architect with Liberty and similar to Gillian, I have worked across multiple different teams and areas in my 19 years working here with Liberty for everything from C++ mainframe development, the introduction to JavaScript, the introduction to Java and Spring and moving into this sort of adoption cycle. And then now, more recently, moving into microservices, all the good DevOps practices, and ultimately, where we're heading there with this big push to the cloud and serverless adoption. So been through the entire journey from you know, from mainframe to serverless.

Gillian: Yes, so Mark, and I work in very different areas, but we try to be really collaborative across the company and sort of some of these bigger things like serverless.

Jeremy: Well, Mark, it's good to be talking to another developer old-timer like myself. I appreciate that. Alright, so let's start, because again, Liberty Mutual is huge and you are actually part of Liberty Information Technology. So these are separate companies and I'm fascinated by how large organizations work and how all things are distributed and stuff like that. So maybe one of you can explain to me and to the listeners, what's the relationship between Liberty Information Technology and Liberty Mutual?

Gillian: Yes. So we did say Liberty Mutual had about 50,000 employees. About 4000 of those are in IT. And the company we work for Liberty IT is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Liberty Mutual. We have about 600 software engineers based between Belfast in Northern Ireland and Dublin in Ireland. And they are all fully focused on delivering world-class software and solutions for Liberty Mutual.

Mark: Yeah, so we're very much a software house, focus on high performance engineering and really delivering those world-class solutions that Gillian mentioned. So we're slightly different from the rest of the Liberty Mutual sort of area where they may have a mixture of developers and business. We're very focused on software engineering.

Jeremy: Awesome. Alright, so that makes a lot of sense. Thank you. Alright, so I want to talk to you today because you both mentioned a lot about serverless. Liberty Mutual is obviously embracing serverless. So let's talk about that. How is or how Liberty Mutual is embracing serverless? And maybe let's start just by sort of how did the team kind of discover serverless like, what was the point where you said, “Hey, let's start looking into this new technology?”

Mark: Yeah, I think that also goes back to where, in 2014, where we started our public cloud journey, I guess. So the form the public cloud came, and they started opening up the access to AWS and seeing how this whole new cloud thing would work within the big enterprise. And so a lot of that start in 2014 into 2015 was really just dipping our toes in the water and exploring cloud capabilities. Then we had very little workload in there. Coming into 2015, it was starting to get the initial learning, starting to set up the pathways to get to the cloud. Try to build in those capabilities that a big enterprise like ours needs. So real focus on security. Real focus on how do the development teams actually get access to this stuff. You know, what are good practices? And again working with AWS and partnering with them to figure out what that looks like. So our public cloud team did a really great job in starting to explore the space and open up for the enterprise this new awesome capability that’s the cloud. And then into 2015 or 2016, we were into the, you know, starting to really think about what apps we could we migrate to the cloud. What modernization can we do? What sort of approaches could we take so that we can break down our big monolithic applications and break them into things that will actually fit in the cloud. And then all the way through to 2016, we have maybe 10.5 percent of our workload’s in the cloud. 2016-17 we’re in the 12.5%. Then 2018 we’re at 20%, and now we’re up to about 30% of our workloads, plus, in the cloud, and all through that time it’s been around developing the capabilities, developing the expertise and partnering with AWS, and really learning what the cloud capabilities are there. A lot of this was traditional through EC2, RDS-type work, moving the workloads into that. And then we get into containers, we get into the whole DevOps practices, and now ultimately, we're starting to really get after serverless.

Jeremy: Okay, Awesome. Alright, so then let's talk about just your strategy for adoption, right? And we can probably go a little bit deeper into the timeline as we get further into the conversation. But let's ...