Companies news

Eva Group and UEX Health Insurance : Infrastructure-as-Code and Continuity

The client:

UEX Health Insurance is a Singapore-based start-up company founded in 2016 and offering insurance personalization services. Their mission is to use smart technology to make private insurance simple, fast, efficient and personalized for their members. 

By using the dynamic UEX application, the customer is able to customize an insurance plan and price for one person or more, in just a few clicks. Power is placed back into customer’s hands. 

The context:

Early in its history, UEX has chosen AWS platform to support its burgeoning activities and leverage Cloud flexibility to match their rapid growth. UEX is born digital, thus AWS was the logical choice at their inception. Along the years, more AWS SaaS services have been added in the architecture. The UEX bet has not been off all this time, and expectations have already been met, waiting for upcoming new services to be rolled out.

The challenges:

• UEX has defined a secure design blueprint for its infrastructure and wants to ensure that new regions are deployed following the same while reducing the manual workload for its Operations team
• UEX wants to be able to deploy quickly and automatically identify new regions for its Business Continuity Plan
• UEX wants to automate deployment of new BackEnd systems to leverage more on scalability mechanisms and achieve higher level of reliability and availability.

The solution:

EVA Group has designed an infrastructure blueprint for UEX offering network segregation between functions and environments, high-availability and ability to scale out and scale in. To provide quick and reliable deployment of this blueprint on a region, EVA Group has provided a set of Infrastructure-as-Code scripts (IaC) based on AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit). AWS CDK works with AWS Cloud Formation by generating the Cloud Formation templates matching the CDK code.

To provide better flexibility, the code has been split in a set of scripts, matching the environments setup and configuring all objects inside those, including security features and configuration.

This IaC scripts are the same to be used for deploying a new region (for new business) or to recreate a new implementation in case of BCP.

To cover the scalability, the CI-CD pipeline mechanisms for deployment have been reworked to seamlessly deploy on 1 to N targets. While previously, the deployment of a new fully functional system was done in a few days, it can now be done in a few hours with lesser manual tasks.

Results and benefits:

Having IaC scripts ready and tested, augmented with automatic deployment scripts, has considerably increased the confidence of UEX, and by extension the confidence of their partners and customers, in their ability to scale with the business growth, the reliability and resilience of their infrastructure and application, and have more insurance that RTO/RPO are fulfilled.

As a side benefit, leveraging on scalability mechanisms opens the door for cost saving areas – such as matching the resources used more closely and decommission them when in low usage – and for spot instances.

•  Deployment of new regions are now done quickly and always as per the blueprint.
•  Same IaC scripts are used to deploy new regions for business as for BCP purpose.
•  The deployment of new BackEnd systems can be deployed within a few minutes once a new region deployment starts.

Why EVA Group ?

With more than 13 years of expertise in network infrastructures, EVA Group has proven experience in legacy and Cloud architectures, from Design to Operations, including integration. As an AWS partner for several years, EVA Group has all the necessary skills to support its customers in their evolution towards the cloud.

Leveraging on EVA Group APAC, its Singapore-based APAC HQ, EVA Group has delivered all the intended work and expertise locally, ensuring flexibility, short response time and time zone alignment.

Next steps:

• As systems are moving into self-provisioning, the containerization becomes a mechanism more attractive to leverage on to provide more capability for rightsizing and cost optimisation.
• To continue to improve the automatic deployment of new systems.
• To continue to add more IaC scripts to finalize the full automation from the Infrastructure to the Application layers.

Source: EVA Group

Photo: Unsplash