Full-Fledged Infrastructure Automation and Cloud Support to Finance and Insurance Company

Client Information

Our client specializes in dealing with the challenges of the insurance, investment and claims industry. With an expertise in managing complex risks and providing expert advice on risk management and financial matters, the company has catered to the needs of a large clientele in about 100 countries and jurisdictions for almost a century.

Client Requirements

The client required a full-fledged IT Infrastructure and Cloud support to automate infrastructure changes, application installation and automate configuration using Ansible on both public and private cloud environment. Additionally, the objective was to automate the installation and configuration of servers and application servers.

Challenges Faced by the Client

1) Disparity in Internal Processes During Automation

The client experienced challenges implementing infrastructure automation using Ansible due to inconsistent internal processes across different environments. This disparity led to inefficiencies in automation efforts and hindered the smooth execution of infrastructure changes.

2) Frequent Outages in the Development Environment

The client faced recurring outages in their development environment, which impacted productivity and caused delays in project timelines. Ensuring stability across the development environment was a critical challenge that must be addressed.

3) Silos Between Test and Production Environments

The client’s infrastructure lacked seamless integration between test and production environments, leading to code deployment failures and performance issues. These silos created inconsistencies, which resulted in performance degradation during application installation and configuration.

4) Complexity in Managing Public and Private Cloud Infrastructure

Managing infrastructure across public and private cloud environments required a unified approach to automate server and application installations, making it difficult for the client to maintain consistency and control across various platforms.

Solutions Provided by Veritis

1) Standardized Automation with Ansible Playbooks

Veritis addressed the disparity in internal processes by implementing best practices for writing Ansible playbooks. These standardized playbooks enabled the client to automate infrastructure changes, ensuring consistency across different environments and streamlining operations.

2) Stabilizing the Development Environment

Veritis worked closely with the client to address development environment outages by automating configuration and server management tasks using Ansible. This stabilized the environment, minimized downtime, and allowed uninterrupted development processes.

3) Integrated Test and Production Environments

Veritis helped eliminate silos between test and production environments by automating the installation and configuration of application servers and databases. The infrastructure was aligned across environments using Ansible, ensuring smooth code deployments and improved performance.

4) Unified Cloud Automation

Veritis utilized Ansible and Ansible Tower to manage infrastructure automation across public and private cloud environments. This included automating container creation with Docker and the entire server build process, enabling the client to maintain control and consistency across diverse cloud platforms.

Veritis Approach

Understanding the client requirement, the team of Veritis experts offered IT infrastructure solutions that helped the client in increasing the speed and accuracy of their applications, which in turn delivered faster results to their end-customers. Also, the infrastructure environment addressed the concern of silos between the test and production environments which earlier led to code deployment failures and performance issues of different Operating System (OS) packages.

Key Responsibilities Held

• Implementing best practices to write playbooks
• Writing Ansible playbooks and creating documentation for changes in infrastructure
• Writing application and DB playbooks which will automate installation and configuration of application servers as well as DB servers
• Managing server groups through Ansible Tower
• Automating container creation using Ansible playbooks
• Automating the complete build process using ansible playbooks

Environments Used

Ansible, Docker, Ansible Tower, OpenShift were the tools involved in the implementation of the project.

Value Delivered

Veritis Team of developers has helped the client by reducing IT operational pressures and boosting operational effectiveness while reducing the risks in operating and maintaining IT infrastructure by using Ansible and Docker.