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Accelerating an insurance company’s cloud journey

An established insurance company approached Maxima Consulting, intending to modernize its application workloads as part of its journey to the cloud.
An established insurance company approached Maxima Consulting, intending to modernize its application workloads as part of its journey to the cloud.

Bottom line up front

An established insurance company approached Maxima Consulting, intending to modernize its application workloads as part of its journey to the cloud. The client was searching for partners who could provide the expertise necessary for efficient workload optimization and quick cloud migration in a cost-effective manner.

We began with a rapid modernization pilot project, where in less than 10 weeks, a legacy .Net-based monolithic application running in the client’s data center was modernized, containerized, and deployed in an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster. Our Cloud Orbit platform improved the system observability, enabled one-click deployments, and facilitated full compatibility with the Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) approach. 

After gaining the client’s confidence by solving their previous issues with migrating legacy apps and achieving the project goals in record time, we are now involved in modernizing more of their applications, leveraging the Cloud Orbit Migration Factory setup already established within the client’s Microsoft Azure cloud environment.

Challenges

  • Depending on monolithic applications written in .Net, Java, etc.
  • Critical applications were incompatible with the public clouds
  • No prior experience in modernizing application workloads
  • Lack of deep expertise in cloud technologies, including containers and Kubernetes
  • Lack of appropriate DevOps and GitOps skills and experience
  • Previous attempts at modernization were only partially successful

Project objectives

  • Modernize legacy applications: refactor code, correct compile/runtime issues, and perform unit testing.
  • Deploy these apps as containers to an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster.
  • Configure automated CI/CD pipelines from Azure DevOps (ADO) as Git to Azure Container Registry (ACR) registry and then to AKS cluster.
  • Improve performance observability and application availability.
  • Centralize build, deploy, and runtime logs and improve logs observability by making them available in a single-pane-of-glass dashboard to simplify troubleshooting and compliance reporting.
  • Implement an automated alert management system to report potential issues and bottlenecks proactively.

Our approach and solution

Maxima Consulting adopted a low-touch approach to modernization, accelerated by using our Cloud Orbit platform and followed by implementing automation and observability features. We began with setting up Cloud Orbit in the client’s environment, which had restricted internet access. Once we connected the platform to the client’s Azure account, we also linked it to Azure DevOps (ADO), Azure Container Registry (ACR), and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). 

Linking the git repository application to Cloud Orbit enabled us to accelerate all modernization and containerization activities. From then on, the process was iterative. We focused on fixing one part at a time and achieving incremental progress. As a result, the same Cloud Orbit Migration Factory setup can now be used to modernize more of our client’s applications.

Client’s benefits

  • Successfully modernized legacy application now runs in a containerized Azure environment.
  • A fully automated Kubernetes cluster ensures that modernized applications can handle varying workloads.
  • An automated CI/CD pipeline reduces time-to-market for product features.
  • Cloud Orbit dashboard enables 24/7 infrastructure monitoring and improves the application’s visibility to enable further optimizations of availability and performance.
  • Log management tools collect all infrastructure and application logs in one place.
  • An integrated alert management system notifies proper team members of any application performance variations.

Project highlights

  1. We built the modernized applications to seamlessly run on Microsoft Azure, an industry-standard cloud provider.
  2. We utilized Cloud Orbit to automate cloud-native architecture setup and GitOps integration so the client’s application team can execute successive releases with observability in Azure DevOps.
  3. Implementing Cloud Orbit virtually eliminated the need for containerization and Kubernetes skills within the client’s team, as it is configured to automatically containerize and deploy the modernized code to the AKS cluster.
  4. We implemented a single-pane-of-glass dashboard to give the client’s teams comprehensive insight into the entire cloud environment.
  5. Cloud Orbit’s automated alerts enabled a more proactive security stance by alerting teams about potential issues to avoid performance degradation and improve app availability.
  6. Connecting Cloud Orbit to the client’s Azure account enabled us to use the same Migration Factory configuration to modernize all legacy, on-premise applications they struggled with.