INDUSTRIES
Financial Services
SERVICES
DevOps
Managed Services
”Thanks to [Mantel Group], our cloud platform is fast becoming a tremendous asset and enabler for us as a technology team. Not only do we have straight through CICD pipelines for all of our environments, we have an auto-scaling production environment which ensures our platform can handle the unexpected peaks in demand and a platform whereby we can innovate strongly on AWS. "
Open Insurance
Company Overview
Open is a fintech insurance company that differentiates itself by providing embedded insurance products and services for some of the largest and fastest growing brands across Australia, New Zealand and the UK. Their partners are able to embed our car, home and travel insurance into their digital experiences, providing customers with access to fast insurance that’s easy to purchase and manage while providing the best value.
Open’s flagship products are available under their own Huddle brand and are also white-labled across other key partners which include AHM and BUPA.
The Problem
As Open continued to scale and grow, it was identified that Open’s traditional approach to cloud would not meet the needs of the business. In order to meet the incredible growth demands from key partners and internal stakeholders the technology team identified the need to uplift its AWS capability to a more innovative and efficient approach.
Open engaged our Managed Services team to assist them with the re-architecture of the infrastructure and app tier while also providing in depth knowledge and support on key AWS products and services that can be used to help grow the product and service innovations in the business.
The Solution
Our Managed Services engagement began in April 2022. We were selected as we’re an AWS Premier Partner and a certified AWS Managed Services Provider
The DevOps as a Service team worked alongside the Open engineers in a collaborative way, operating as an extension of Open’s DevOps team, delivering proactive, continuous optimisations and enhancements of their AWS foundations and automation.
We made an initial assessment of the Open Insurance environment and developed a detailed network design for the replacement that was approved by Open insurance. This design was implemented leveraging automation and Infrastructure as Code (AWS Cloud Development Kit)
The bespoke solution was tailored to suit Open’s current and future requirements of a multi-region, compliant environment.
Other key attributes of the solution implemented were:
- Reduced toil through rinse and repeat automation pipelines
- Like-For-like environments throughout the SDLC (dev → stage → prod) reducing the risk of production deployment issues.
- Hosting the existing front end application in S3
- Decoupling the data tier from the application tier.
- Enhanced security checks (code, infrastructure, containers)
- Uplift to Open’s infrastructure availability through the introduction of horizontal scaling through the implementation of auto-scaling.
A consultative approach to design through short form design proposals, presented to the Open team prior to implementation.
Key Products/Services Used
- AWS CDK
- Docker
- Elastic Container Service
- S3
- Gitlab
Outcomes, Results & Benefits
The overall result and benefits to the Open Insurance business were:
- Decoupling the data from the application tier ensured improved scaling and improved throughput.
- Reduced risk and stronger developer experience through repeatable processes and automation.
- Enhanced monitoring of costs provided a fine-grained cost breakdown per workload, minimising the Total Cost of Ownership, whilst providing stronger cost visibility across the AWS fleet.
Open insurance now has a modern, scalable, and highly available environment that is replicated through each stage of the software development lifecycle. This approach to environment design ensures Open’s workloads stay in step with the latest in cloud innovation and best practice. The project has further empowered Development and Application teams by providing them with a safe environment to experiment at speed in. Through end-to-end automation and implementation of guardrails, Open’s internal teams can now ensure repeatability and consistency.
