Software Engineering Daily

Going Serverless in Financial Services with Brian McNamara

Jan 7, 2025

Brian McNamara, a Distinguished Engineer at Capital One, dives into serverless computing in financial services. He discusses how Capital One transitioned to this model, focusing on unique challenges like governance and cost management. Brian highlights the importance of collaboration among teams and the strategic shift in engineering roles. He explores the benefits of re-architecting applications for the cloud and the necessity of effective notification systems for developers. Listeners gain insights into the future trends of serverless technology in the banking sector.

37:58

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Brian McNamara

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Quick takeaways

Capital One's shift to serverless computing significantly improved developer experience by reducing operational burdens and fostering innovation through minimized costs.

The adoption of serverless technologies in regulated financial services requires rigorous governance and compliance, integrating controls seamlessly into development pipelines for security.

Deep dives

Transition to Serverless Computing

Capital One made a strategic shift to serverless computing to enhance the developer experience while reducing operational burdens. This transition, initiated in 2021, aimed to establish Capital One as a 'serverless-first' company, encouraging teams to consider serverless technologies like AWS Lambda and Fargate for new applications. The underlying motivation was to minimize not just cloud infrastructure costs, but also engineering and maintenance costs, allowing developers to focus on innovation. Leadership recognized that serverless technologies offer built-in resiliency and flexibility, enabling applications to scale based on real-time business demand.

Intro

2min

Evolving Roles in Engineering: The Shift to Serverless

5min

Adapting to Cloud Technologies and Cost Optimization

2min

Serverless Transformation at Capital One

16min

The Importance of Effective Notification Systems for Developers

2min

Navigating Serverless Excellence at Capital One

11min

Serverless computing is a cloud-native model where developers build and run applications without managing server infrastructure. It has largely become the standard approach to achieve scalability, often with reduced operational overhead. However, in banking and financial services, adopting a serverless model can present unique challenges.

Brian McNamara is a Distinguished Engineer at Capital One where he works in serverless integration and development. Brian joins the show with Sean Falconer to talk about why Capital One shifted to a serverless approach, how to think about cloud costs, establishing governance controls, tools to stay well-managed, and much more.

Full Disclosure: This episode is sponsored by Capital One.

Sean’s been an academic, startup founder, and Googler. He has published works covering a wide range of topics from AI to quantum computing. Currently, Sean is an AI Entrepreneur in Residence at Confluent where he works on AI strategy and thought leadership. You can connect with Sean on LinkedIn.