 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 because they're coming to us from Wisconsin, both from Northwestern Mutual. Sitting to my left here is Kyle Person, who is a senior engineer, and sitting to his left is Sean Corkham, who is also a senior engineer. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. All right, we thought, you know, both of us coming from colder climates that may be 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? Exactly. There's a sign out there that says, get warm, 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, you know, how people should think of Northwestern Mutual in 2020 and your roles. Yeah, so obviously we mean we're 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 gonna be a differentiator in the marketplace, you know, 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, great. And Sean, I understand you're 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 1,200 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, you know, a software company that is providing financial service and 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. Great, so we have that. So Kyle, maybe if you can, you know, when did GitLab enter the picture? What was kind of 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 adopting the 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 and mid-2015, we had kind of a 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 because 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 second, the ops, but really allowing everybody into the same tooling, even marketing and finance. What's kind of the breadth of the organization is it mostly devs, 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 it at a conious scale where we can just use GitLab to provide that seamless interface that's something we always look 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 cloud native con 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 drop kick the boat off the end of the pier and see where we end up. So we started working down the path of deploying GitLab into Kubernetes because 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 to speak a little bit, 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 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 XYZ 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. So Kyle, the two of you are presenting here at the show. We love, we heard GitLab talking on stage as customers don't just use it, they commit, they add feedback and they speak of the show. So maybe we 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 and I'm gonna talk about our dabble in Kubernetes CI. So we're really looking to, we're looking for efficiencies I guess in density. That's a primary driver behind trying to explore the throughout 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 and they're getting stale and not being rotated. We can do some neat things with Kubernetes and it's native IAM 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? Yeah. Pretty much covers it. And beyond with the CI, being able to run GitLab itself within Kube and having the different components broken out we're 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 of 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 of, 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 Niko from WhiteDuck who is from Germany. That's not something you get to do face to face all the time. All right, Sean can you share with our audience any of those, if we could do it over again, we'd change something, is it an organizational thing or technical piece? Don't use EFS for your Git repo data. It will not end well for you. I think it will, yeah. Good take away, yeah. All right, Kyle how about you? You've been to a number of these shows. Is it the networking the piece or what else? What for you personally and for NM brings you back? Yeah, networking is 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 then 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. Yeah, 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, or 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 wanted 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 you 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 out without there as we can. Well, Kyle and John, thank you so much for sharing with our audience. Best of luck with your presentations and have a great time at the show. Yeah, thanks so much. Thank you. All right, thank you to NM for joining us. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.