IT Infrastructure Automation for Financial Operations

Client Information

The client is a leading global insurance firm involved in risk assessment and financial services. The company caters to insurance-related service requirements of various industries including construction, healthcare, education, energy, technology, transportation, financial institutions and public entities, among others.

Client Requirements

Enhancing infrastructure capacity and management through automation.

Challenges

1) Manual Infrastructure Management

The client’s existing infrastructure management processes were highly manual, resulting in inefficiencies and delays. Provisioning, configuring, and patching servers required significant manual effort, which affected the speed and scalability of their financial operations.

2) Complexity in Supporting Multiple Platforms

The client had a diverse IT environment, including web app servers, Apache Tomcat servers, Red Hat, and Windows servers, deployed across public and private clouds. Managing the complexity of these platforms and ensuring consistency in their configurations presented a significant challenge.

3) Lack of Infrastructure Automation

The client faced difficulties automating infrastructure tasks such as spinning up servers, monitoring server performance, and deploying applications. Without automation, these tasks consume significant time and resources, making it challenging to keep up with the demands of their global operations.

4) Data Integration and Pipeline Automation

Initially, the client’s data was uploaded manually to the Chef server, leading to data processing and deployment bottlenecks. The absence of an automated pipeline for managing data, images, and containers hindered the seamless integration of their infrastructure and applications.

Solutions

1) Infrastructure Automation with Chef

Veritis implemented infrastructure automation by developing Chef cookbooks and recipes to manage various platforms, including web app servers, Apache Tomcat, Red Hat, and Windows servers. These cookbooks automated server provisioning, configuration, and patching, significantly reducing manual effort and improving operational efficiency.

2) Cross-Platform Support

Veritis provided expert support for managing the client’s complex multi-platform environment. Our team used Chef to ensure uniform configurations across different platforms, reducing complexity and enhancing consistency. Automating builds, deployments, and testing across public and private clouds simplified management.

3) Automated Server Provisioning and Monitoring

We created a fully automated pipeline using Chef, Docker, Kubernetes, Jenkins, and Terraform, which automated server spinning up and application deployments. Servers were monitored in real time, ensuring optimal performance, while the automation of repetitive tasks allowed the client to focus on core business functions.

4) Data and Pipeline Automation

Veritis developed an automated pipeline that integrated Docker, Jfrog Artifactory, Kubernetes, and Jenkins to streamline data and image management. The pipeline automatically ran Ruby scripts in Jenkins to move data to the Chef server, replacing the manual data upload process. This significantly improved the efficiency of the client’s infrastructure management process.

Veritis Approach

Veritis offerings, with respect to IT infrastructure management services, include service monitoring, data security, deleting, safeguarding and management of data, secure provisioning, addressing configuration patchworks and server automation processes, among others.

We fulfilled the aforementioned client requirements by provisioning or facilitating developer requirements, resulting in an effective IT infrastructure automation.

Following are some of the key processes we successfully implemented:

• Our team of experts including Chef developers, architects and managers developed cookbooks for various platforms such as web app servers, Apache Tomcat servers, Red hat and windows servers using public and private clouds.
• Using Chef, our DevOps engineers performed day-to-day operations that support the automation of builds, deployments, testing and infrastructure (infrastructure as code).
• We developed Chef Recipes to configure, deploy and maintain software components of the existing infrastructure.
• We developed different types of cookbooks. For instance, we had developed one from BASE PACKAGES for an application to Big Cookbooks that automate and make ec2 instances or virtual machines on a single click.
• We created a pipeline wherein, we built images in Docker and pushed them to our local repository called Jfrog Artifactory and further integrated it with Kubernetes and Jenkins to run the tasks.
• Uploading the data to our chef server manually in the initial stages, we moved on to create a pipeline that automatically runs the ruby scripts in Jenkins and get the data to Chef Server. This, in fact, is one of our major implementations for this specific client.

Value Delivered

With sound expertise in IT infrastructure services, Veritis delivered end-to-end infrastructure support.

Key Deliveries:

• Infrastructure Automation
• Spinning Servers
• Server Monitoring
• Web App Requirements

During the entire delivery cycle:

• On a regular basis, we configured Chef servers, Chef workstations, Chef nodes and performed bootstrapping of new infrastructure Chef nodes.
• On a weekly basis, we covered timeline of events and performed various troubleshooting tasks to ensure all the needed requirements are met.
• Overall, we ensured full-fledged infrastructure support by providing all the necessary tools and servers that addressed the challenges in building and running applications.

Environments Used

Chef Tools, Service Monitoring Tools, Private and Public Clouds, CS Modules, Trend Micro, CS Modules, Blade Logic, to name a few are some of the major tools we used. Major technical stack involved includes Docker, Kubernetes, Chef, Jenkins and Terraform.