Summary
When a leading insurance firm in the US found itself struggling with the modernization and cloud migration of its applications due to a lack of the right expertise and tools, Cloud Control stepped in with its state-of-the-art AppZ platform. In less than 10 weeks, a .Net-based monolithic application running in the firm’s data center was modernized, containerized, and deployed in an Azure AKS cluster with observability and One-click deployment capabilities. What started as a single app modernization and migration engagement, has now grown to include several other applications, leveraging the AppZ factory setup within the client’s Azure cloud environment.
The Client
The client is a leading insurance company based in the US. They needed a cloud partner with the right experience, tools, and methodologies in modernizing application workloads and migrating them to the cloud rapidly and cost-effectively.
Client Challenges
The insurance firm had had cloud migration and application modernization on its agenda for a while. Most of its current applications were monolithic and quite a few of these were incompatible with modern public clouds. The firm attempted to move to the cloud with the help of its in-house team. But with no prior experience or the right skills – such as DevOps, GitOps, Kubernetes, containers – required for modernizing and migrating application workloads, this became a challenge. The client’s existing vendor also attempted to help modernize and migrate the application, but this too was only partly successful due to the vendor’s lack of deep expertise in cloud technologies such as containers and Kubernetes.
Clearly Defined Objectives
- Deploy the customer application on an Azure cluster.
- Configure automated CI/CD pipelines from Azure DevOps as Git to ACR registry and to the Azure Kubernetes Service cluster where the app would be finally deployed.
- Centralize all logs and make them available for troubleshooting and compliance reporting.
- Secure visibility into the performance and availability of the application running in containers.
- Incorporate alert management to report on potential issues and bottlenecks proactively.
A Planned Approach
Cloud Control adopted a low-touch tool-accelerated approach to modernization combined with automation and observability. Our objective was to achieve 100% application modernization, including code refactoring, correcting compile/runtime issues, unit testing, and then deploying the application as containers in an AKS Kubernetes cluster.
We set up the Cloud Control AppZ platform in the insurance firm’s environment and connected it to the client’s Azure account. AppZ was then linked to Azure DevOps, Azure Container Registry, Azure Kubernetes Service, and the Git repository application, which fast-tracked the modernization and containerization activities. The process was iterative, fixing one part at a time and achieving incremental progress.
Deployment Highlights –Running in 10 weeks!
- The AppZ Factory set up in the client’s Azure account made it easier to modernize its legacy, on-premise applications.
- AppZ provided a fully automated cloud-native architecture with all the applications designed to run on Azure.
- With fully automated GitOps, the client could execute continuous releases with observability from their Azure DevOps repository.
- AppZ automatically containerized the modernized code and then deployed it in the AKS cluster, eliminating the need for containerization and for hiring Container/Kubernetes skills.
- Standard AppZ Stacks (reusable, curated, and scanned images) helped automate the building and deployment of the application stack.
- The AppZ dashboard provided comprehensive visibility and observability of the application cloud environment.
Business Value Delivered
- The insurance firm can continue to modernize its applications quickly and efficiently in a containerized environment on Azure.
- The migration factory setup using Cloud Control AppZ is enabling the customer to speed up the migration by five times and complete the batches in months, rather than years.
- A completely automated CI/CD pipeline reduced the launch time for the application with enhanced features and functionalities, decreasing the time for new features and updates to days rather than weeks.
- We enabled proactive management of application performance variations using a well-defined alert management setup.