Application Containerization on AWS EKS, Infrastructure Automation using Terraform for a Germany-Based Insurance Provider

Client

The client is a German Financial Services Group, serving customers in the Insurance and Financial Asset Management areas. It is also one of the largest insurance services companies, and a global market leader in health, medical, and P&C insurance.

Challenges

• The client wanted to deploy their core Insurance Application - ABS, which was the backend for one of their critical banking customers for insurance processing, and its supporting applications on AWS.
• ABS was a monolithic application, while the supporting applications were microservices-based.
• The client wanted to offer this as a service to its end customers and was looking for automated, replicable deployments
• Being a Financial Services company, the client was bound by various regulations and compliances, which made a secondary DR site mandatory, along with production. The client expected the RTO to be less than four-hours and RPO  less than 24-hours.

LTM Solution

• An automated AWS Landing Zone was set up with the following accounts - Organization Account, Production Account, Dev, Pre-Prod, Management, DR, Centralized Logging, and Security Account.
•  All logs will be centrally stored in the logging account. All management applications like Control-M, AD, and Jenkins will be deployed in the management account. 
• The core insurance ERP was deployed across multiple AZs and load balanced using ALB. 
• Non-ABS applications were microservices-based and talked to the ABS running to process/ fetch the required data based on the request.
• Auto-scaling was enabled at the service level and EC2 level to scale out the microservices based on the load.
• Terraform templates were designed for automated, replicable launch of the ABS and non-ABS application infrastructure for the DR accounts.
• The whole AWS infra was built using terraform and any changes to the infra were deployed automatically through the pipeline.
• Jenkins was used as a CI/CD tool for app deployment.

Business Benefits

• The core ERP & supporting apps were successfully deployed on AWS environment while meeting the security and high availability guidelines as per the compliance. 
• 200 concurrent users handled successfully by the application during load testing.
• 4X increase in app performance
• Automated infrastructure provisioning reduced the setup time from few days to within three- hours. 
• Automated DR environment reduced time to setup DR from weeks to few hours.