The use of serverless computing as part of the strategy to deal with cloud applications has increased in recent years. Liberty Information Technology Ltd. is one of the supporters of this strategy. The company sees serverless bringing architecture back into the engineering team, enabling creativity and innovation.

“Serverless for us, it’s not just functions of service. Its not saying: ‘We’re just using kind of something like Lambda,'” said David Anderson (pictured), director of technology at Liberty Information Technology. “It is really about that idea of using managed service, thinking about evolution of architecture. How can we kind of try and cut out anything that is actually not differentiating?”

Anderson spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, in a digital CUBE Conversation. They discussed Liberty’s serverless strategy, how the engineering team works in this environment, and examples of serverless developments.

Engineers gain great autonomy

Calling itself an insurance company that uses modern technologies to deliver value to business partners and customers, Liberty considers serverless strategy a resource to create everything it needs, with the flexibility to rent it wherever it wants.

An example is the creation of Workgrid Software inside the company. “That was a project that we had an internal digital assistant that we built with some of our teams … four to five years ago,” Anderson pointed out. “And our CIO, James McGlennon, decided to fund that as a kind of a startup … so they kind of decided that they would be serverless-first in their approach.”

Since serverless brings architecture back into the team, it gives engineers huge autonomy. A single team has the responsibility to create value, engineer the solution, make sure the security is good enough, and build the operation, according to Anderson.

“It’s just fascinating to see where they go,” Anderson highlighted. “You start to see the creativity and innovation of the engineers, so it is truly unbelievable to watch.”

Liberty does not intend to go serverless for all applications in its portfolio, because this movement must be decided one by one and based on what is best for the business, Anderson added. But for new developments, the serverless strategy is definitely considered “interesting.”

Last year, Liberty’s engineering team used the serverless approach to create a financial aggregation system, used to do much of the company’s accounting. “It was kind of serverless ETL,” he explained. “We’re trying to do like an end-of-month batch system to detect a lot of accounts from different countries and kind of pipe them into a general ledger.”

The system recently performed about 100 million transactions for a relatively low cost, according to Anderson. “Of course, being a month-end system, the rest of the months there’s zero cost,” he explained. “You don’t pay for idle.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE