TokioMarineKiln (TMK), an Insurance Underwriter needed to improve their analysis of data with database replication using a tool that was new to the business.
At this time, the business was driving automation as a key deliverable. Parts of their Infrastructure were built with manual tasks and disconnected automation, which required urgent redress.
A typical day during the project, which was run in an Agile manner, would start with a standup attended by the whole team, exploring the previous day’s challenges, what was achieved and the day ahead. Priorities were then reviewed, updated and the team advised by the Project Managers.
In order to establish the Architectural aspects of the project, we would establish a clear discussion with the Architect around the design principles. This would clearly lay out how the implementation was meant to connect together.
There were elements to the Infrastructure that involved a service from a 3rd party supplier that we had not worked with before, this meant we had to rapidly understand the capabilities and limitations of the product.
In order to build the new solution in a way that conformed to Architectural standards, we had to first understand the knowledge of the product, relate this to the business deliverables and ensure what was to be delivered would be fit for purpose. This was achieved through discussions with the provider’s technical team, which provided ratification of the knowledge we had absorbed, clarifying anything that was unclear to ensure the automation would be improved from both a security and reliability perspective.
To improve the processes, we added new features to the Infrastructure build, with input from and assurance by Infosec. Our way of working, in this project has always been to deliver a service that was robust and could be easily maintained.
Upon go-live this service would be the responsibility of another team, to this end we ensured comprehensive documentation of the processes involved and any service transition meetings required. This would be accessible through the internal knowledge base post-project.
Tools involved:
Gitlab CI, Terraform, SQL, SnowSQL, OpenSSL, Docker, Ansible, AWS, Azure.
Software involved:
Confluence, Jira, Lucid.
