How Aegon Life India leveraged Cloud Native Technologies to transform into a leading digital service company
Challenge
Insurance company Aegon Life India was hindered by its traditional monolithic architecture, which could not meet the rapid growth of business needs in the digital era. Its legacy core systems were a barrier to digital innovation, a barrier to launching new products across new channels, and a barrier delivering a better user experience.
Solution
To drive digital transformation, Aegon Life India migrated core processes from its traditional monolith to a microservice-based architecture leveraging multiple cloud native projects, with Kubernetes as the backbone, supported by eBaoCloud’s InsureMO platform.
Impact
The benefits of adopting cloud native technologies have been significant:
- Time-to-market: Aegon Life India was able to launch a group platform with an eCommerce company within six weeks, which otherwise would have taken months
- Simplicity: Multiple lines of businesses now run off a single platform
- Interoperability: Aegon Life India is now one of a few carriers capable of providing API support for distribution partners
- Scalability: Kubernetes and message-driven architecture ensures scalability to support the business’ rapid growth
- Connectivity: Out-of-box APIs simplify connectivity to different channels
- Agility: Aegon Life India now has the ability to introduce new microservices without impacting the legacy system
Projects used
By the numbers
New Product launches
Reduced from months to 2 weeks
Deployment time
Cut from hours to minutes, with zero downtime
partner onboarding process
Shortened from weeks to 1-3 days
Aegon Life India’s vision is to be the most recommended new age life insurance company
With this goal in mind, Aegon Life India’s Direct to Customer focus establishes a direct dialogue with customers to make for greater clarity and transparency.
In the digital era, Aegon Life India faces the three ‘Vs’:
- Big transaction VOLUME
- VELOCITY to market
- VARIANCE of different insurance products and channels
But Aegon Life India’s traditional monolithic architecture was incapable of managing vast business transaction volumes, due to its weak scalability. Douglas Kennedy, Chief Technology Officer, Aegon Life Insurance, knew an architecture based on cloud native technologies was critical to successfully support the business’ digital transformation and power rapid growth through unlimited scalability.
“Having the right teams, right architecture, and right vision, you can run at great speed“
Douglas Kennedy, Chief Technology Officer, Aegon Life Insurance
To immediately drive the digital transformation necessary to remain competitive in today’s markets, the Aegon Life India team worked through solutions to quickly and seamlessly extend investments in its core systems, without undergoing a wholesale replacement. They needed to enable configuration of new insurance policy types, integration to new channels and partners, as well as rapid development and deployment of new products with low launch costs, to drive new policy volumes at scale.
This fast transformation was realised by migrating core processes to a microservice-based architecture leveraging containerization technology, as well as container orchestration and management using Kubernetes as the underlying backbone.
Velocity was an important consideration for the team throughout, from delivery efficiency and run time performance, to quick troubleshooting capabilities. Leveraging Kubernetes, Helm and Jenkins, the microservice-based architecture allowed developers to perform DevOps on an individual microservice basis, speeding the production process. To cater for the run time performance, the team turned to cloud native programming languages like Go, as well as serverless technologies. And in order to quickly troubleshoot issues, they looked to the tracing and logging capabilities provided by Prometheus and Jaeger.
Aegon Life India also had to consider how to deal with the variance brought by different insurance products and channels across the business. To provide insurance-related business capability and speed up their digitization process, they engaged the eBaoCloud InsureMO platform team, whose platform was directly in line with the architecture that Aegon Life India had crafted: leveraging cloud native technologies including Kubernetes, ETCD, Prometheus, Jaeger, CoreDNS and FluentD. Importantly for Aegon Life India, it provided a PaaS platform oriented for the insurance industry, which enabled them to achieve quick digitalization through out-of-the-box APIs, as well as multi tenancy support, to quickly connect to different channels, including mobile payments.
“This will help us continue to be the differentiators in the industry and achieve greater speed-to-market and speed-to-value. In fact, the first launch of our group platform with an eCommerce player was achieved within six weeks.”
Douglas Kennedy, Chief Technology Officer, Aegon Life Insurance
Powered by cloud native technologies, Aegon Life is now one of the few carriers capable of providing API support for distribution partners, and is among the first companies to launch an Online Term Plan in India. Today, it has become a new age digital service company that can easily scale to take advantage of new business opportunities.