Building an Agile Platform in a Highly Regulated Industry

The presentation discusses the challenges of building a new platform on new technology with limited experience in the company, while balancing the need for control and the ability to move fast. The solution involves questioning traditional approaches and finding new ways to solve issues with modern security approaches and layering.

• The company faces competition from pure tech companies and changing customer expectations, while also dealing with regulatory requirements and the need to maintain customer trust.
• The balancing act involves implementing the right level of security while finding common ground and allowing for both control and the ability to move fast.
• Traditional concerns like networking and web application firewalls still apply, but modern capabilities like Kubernetes and layering can help solve issues in new ways.
• The starting point involved interviewing teams and systematically gathering data to manage Kubernetes, which takes a lot of work.
• The solution involves questioning traditional approaches and finding new ways to solve issues with modern security approaches and layering.

The presenter discusses how they questioned the traditional approach of separating their cluster into the DMC cluster, which would have been costly and maintenance-heavy. Instead, they suggested connecting the platform and clusters to new central components being created by the networking team, utilizing things like networking policy from Calico and private link clusters under central capabilities being created in IF. They also integrated the clusters to their back rules and identity.

During this talk, Jonas Samuelson, Platform Engineer at If-Insurance, and Fredrik Klingenberg, Principal Software Engineer at Aurum AS, will share how If-Insurance — the leading property and casualty insurer in the Nordics — built an agile platform based on Kubernetes, Linkerd, and GitOps within the constraints of a highly regulated industry. How does a large enterprise like If-Insurance balance rapid innovation to compete with disruptive newcomers while adhering to strict security and regulatory requirements? Jonas and Fredrik will discuss If-Insurance's GitOps-based platform and application deployment engine and their tools and techniques to remake the way If-Insurance runs and manages software. This talk will cover how If's immutable platform allows them to train for disaster recovery constantly, how their entire platform was built using GitOps, and how they onboarded teams shifting from a deployment mindset to a GitOps one.Click here to view captioning/translation in the MeetingPlay platform!