Case Study: Northwestern Mutual achieves faster, more reliable deployments with Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Cloud native at Northwestern Mutual

Northwestern Mutual, a financial services and insurance company, faced a challenge with its legacy on-premise infrastructure, which was not agile enough for its digital transformation goals after acquiring LearnVest. Their traditional deployment process was slow and could not provide the elastically scalable and responsive platform required for a modern client experience. To address this, they worked with the vendor Cloud Native Computing Foundation and adopted Kubernetes.

The solution implemented using Cloud Native Computing Foundation's technology involved a new platform on AWS using Docker containers and Kubernetes for orchestration. This shift resulted in infrastructure deployment times being reduced from two weeks to minutes and the number of annual deployments skyrocketing from 24 to over 500. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation ecosystem also enabled the team to build and open-source a new API management tool, Kanali, which replaced a vendor product that required 23 dedicated servers, significantly improving availability and reducing costs.

Northwestern Mutual

Brad Williams

Director of Engineering for Client Experience