Case Study: Northwestern Mutual achieves faster, more reliable deployments with Kubernetes

Cloud Native at Northwestern Mutual

Northwestern Mutual, a Milwaukee-based insurance and financial services company, faced a slow, manual, and error-prone deployment process built around batch workflows in an on-premise datacenter. After acquiring fintech startup LearnVest, the company needed a more elastic, responsive digital platform to support its modern client experience and evolving microservice-based architecture.

Kubernetes helped Northwestern Mutual move from private data centers to AWS, containerize services with Docker, and adopt a cloud-native orchestration platform for its new stack. With Kubernetes, deployments dropped from weeks to minutes, releases increased from about 24 per year to more than 500 in the first 10 months of 2017, planned outage windows were eliminated, and the company also reduced costs by consolidating API management onto Kubernetes instead of running 23 dedicated servers.

Northwestern Mutual

Brad Williams

Director of Engineering for Client Experience