Optimization of IT infrastructure for an insurance company

Expertise:

Backend

Analyst

Tech support

Tech Stack:

Docker

Kubernetes

Ansible

Velero

Kube-prometheus-stack

Helm

ArgoCD

Kafka

ELK

OpenTelemetry

Client: Insurance company

A major insurance company providing property insurance, auto insurance, voluntary health insurance, cargo insurance, construction risk insurance, and more. The company serves over 9 million clients. To enhance service quality, the business develops IT solutions utilizing blockchain technology, big data, and multifactor scoring.

About the Client

Due to the rapid development of a software solution designed to automate sales and facilitate the processing of various insurance products, IT infrastructure modernization was required. The system did not meet business requirements as it had low performance, insufficient fault tolerance, and scalability issues. Additionally, a lack of clear responsibility distribution between system administrators and developers led to internal conflicts, slowing down project growth. The client lacked the necessary in-house expertise to resolve these issues and engaged an outsourced team.

Project Overview

Challenges & Objectives

The DevOps engineers were tasked with improving existing IT infrastructure components and implementing technologies that enable efficient resource management. The key objectives included:

Eliminating bottlenecks by removing unnecessary code and optimizing inter-service communication.
Enhancing the performance of the insurance product sales software through vertical and horizontal scaling and the introduction of automated DevOps tools.
Establishing clear responsibility zones within the IT department by adding input data on specialists (user ID, permissions, selected method type, logs, or errors)

Implementation

To ensure a reliable and functional system, the following actions were taken:

Analyzed the existing IT infrastructure, including development, build, testing, code delivery, and environment management processes.

Developed a phased cluster update plan using Kubespray, allowing for easy and rapid component deployment.

Upgraded and expanded the Kubernetes (K8s) cluster from version 15.x to 22.x, improving development flexibility, reducing deployment time, and automating container management.

Integrated OpenTelemetry into the standard monitoring stack, enhancing application visibility and establishing a unified source of infrastructure performance data.

Assigned a unique identifier to each request to precisely trace software errors, eliminating the need for approximate troubleshooting based on time or IP address.

Relayed OpenTelemetry data on problematic applications to development and operations teams.

Conducted training sessions for the in-house team, explaining new tools and methodologies. DevOps engineers demonstrated how to handle key user requests using both test and real cases.

Outcomes & Business Impact

The optimization of the insurance software product resulted in an 18% increase in IT infrastructure performance. Clearly defined responsibility zones helped resolve internal conflicts within the IT department, fostering a productive environment for future teamwork.

Improved system scalability, allowing the company to handle higher loads without service interruptions.
Reduced deployment times, leading to faster time-to-market for new features and updates.
Increased system reliability and fault tolerance, minimizing downtime and enhancing customer experience.
Strengthened collaboration between IT teams, reducing operational bottlenecks and improving workflow efficiency.
Provided better visibility into system performance, enabling proactive issue resolution and optimized resource allocation.

Optimization of IT infrastructure for an insurance company

Challenges & Objectives

Outcomes & Business Impact

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