 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. 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 the technical architect at Liberty Mutual. Matt, thanks for flying in from Belfast. Good to see you. Yeah, and thanks for having me today. Pleasure. So what's your role as a technical architect? Maybe you describe that, we'll get into a little bit. Yeah, so I'm 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 later down the line. So instead of thinking of me as someone who directly, every day, builds 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 that, 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 to speak. Yeah, because I can only scale to 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 10-axed. When did you first touch the cloud? Personally, it would have been four or 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. Those because traditionally, you would have just written your small piece of code. You would have had a big application that was out there that 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 to try and hack or try to get into, and it was a bit overwhelming, the amount that you needed to learn. So it was. Is it worth it? Oh yeah, completely. 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 and enthusiastic about the stuff I've been doing, because to me, the amount of benefits you can get, like now we can deliver things, that we have teams going out there and doing discovery and frame with the business, and they're pushing well-architected products three days later into production. That was unheard of before this year. So you were part of Werner's keynote this morning. Of course, that's always one of the keynotes most anticipated at Reinvent. It's on the sort of last day, and he's awesome. This is, you know, 10th year of Reinvent. He sort of did a look back. He started out, he's the 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 it was to talk about Liberty Mutual's serverless first journey, and it was, I actually went through from 2014, right 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 impart and enable our developers and we were going to get them excited about doing this, and that's where we needed to make it safe. So there was a lot of work went in at the start to make the cloud safe for our developers to experiment, and then the past two years have been now that it's safe, okay, let's see what we can do, let's go. Yeah, so Liberty Mutual have been around many, many years. Boston-based, 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 100 years old, right? And you got a lot of 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 turf and grow? Yeah, so first of all, we're 109 years old. There you go. So we are, and yeah, so absolutely, there's an entire sure-tech market of people who are 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 has gone wrong. And that's why we're building innovative solutions like a serverless call center we built, that after natural disaster, can automatically process claims in less than four minutes. So, yeah, 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 through. And that's, we're using technology always focused on the customer. That's unbelievable. Think about that experience. I mean, I've filed claims before, and it's kind of time consuming. And you're saying, you've compressed that I mean, it's days, weeks, you know, and then you've compressed that to minutes. Yeah. Talk 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. Cause 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, 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 and measure it. 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 build to go down as our number of customers goes up because that's why we're using the serverless first 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 build 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 talked to, they were like, might be going down as a percentage of revenues, but it actually 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 and whether or not it's going to hold it's a weight 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 costs you $20 to see if that thing will fit in the market. So by the time you're getting to 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 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. Exactly, you have to be out there to understand if it's going to work. Right, because if you go to market and you've got 50% churn, well, you don't want to be worrying about the go-to market. You've got to get back to the product so you can test that and you can iterate. 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... How has the cloud affected developer satisfaction or passion, I guess I should say? I mean, we're an AWS cloud. Our developers, if we told them, okay, you got to go back on prem, they would say, I quit. How has it affected their lives? Yeah, it's completely different and it's way better. So now we have way more ownership over everything than 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 down to the nitty gritty of what we're 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 a lot of it was done by like cloud infrastructure engineers who created these big YAML files that 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 already know and 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 could, 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, the cognitive difference for a developer using CDK versus anything else. Because it's an abstraction, right? And so it just simplifies your life, you can 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 familiar, what do you need? You need an AWS account, obviously. You got to get a command line interface, I would imagine. Maybe some Jode Node.js and often running or... Yeah, so that's, 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 array of working patterns that you can clone in one command. So 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, do 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 where I try to go in, liberties 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 pieces and then I can see where I can have the most impact across the board instead of focusing on one micro pace. So there's a variety of tools and techniques that I would do to go through that, but that's the crux of it. So you look at your business across the portfolios, you have portfolio view and then you do a gap analysis essentially, say okay, where can our 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 in like what we call wordly map and then you can draw a line and you can say everything below this line is undifferentiated heavy lifting. 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, consulting with heads of application development and looking at portfolios and you know, they did their thing but there's 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 and reinvent. And that's the thing in Liberty, I'm not the only one. So there's Tom McLaughlin as an AWS hero and there's Gillian McCann who's an AWS hero and Gillian's in work grid 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 it's a, basically it's about impact in the community. It's not, there's not like a checklist of items you can go through in your 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. That's awesome. So our producer Leonard's looking for an Irish limerick. You know, every say I'm half Irish because it's through my marriage. Yeah, 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 now. I have no limericks for you, so I'm sorry. There once was a producer from, where are you from? So where do you want to take this now? What's your future look like with this program? So right now, today I actually launched a book called the CDK book. 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 of this. 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 further and further throughout the world so that eventually we can start learning, you know, cross business, cross market, cross the main instead of just internally in 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 every time you're building, you're demonstrating that every two weeks are faster. So you need to know the business to do it. Well, Mac, 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 on theCUBE. Thank you, thank you for having me. Our pleasure. And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE at AWS re-invent. We are the leader of global tech coverage. You're right back.