A leading Life Insurer looking for the most reliable and secured Cloud infrastructure for an access free service to its end customers as Oracle database on AWS.

The Insurer was running multiple marketing campaign for its Customers. They want to host their portal since the campaign had unexpected spike and in response to it, they had to frequently upgrade the hardware in no time. Also, to be ahead of the competitors, it was important for them to resolve serious issues in scaling to manage peak loads. In an effort to control its IT costs, the company wanted to turn to a cloud platform. They wanted to quickly scale up additional compute capacity with Oracle database licenses for less cost and no IT overhead by adding to its own data center assets. The management decided to use the cloud infra as it had an additional benefit of in-built security features without additional Capital investment as the same was need for their business compliance’s.

The Insurer was running multiple marketing campaign for its Customers. They want to host their portal since the campaign had unexpected spike in response to it, they had to frequently upgrade the hardware in no time. Facing serious issues in scaling to manage peak loads. As the company had a wide spread nationally and their IT support and services teams had to travel every time to different branches to set the infrastructure, managing the operational expenses was an additional burden. Once the issues were highlighted to the Management by the CTO the company wanted to explore the cloud infrastructure to understand whether their requirements were met without affecting the current operations & ongoing transaction

Versions: Oracle 12c

Being an existing infrastructure support provider, PSSPL analyzed and diagnosed the challenges faced by the customer. Reviewing the current infrastructural setup, we proposed and introduced the management about AWS services and its benefits to the customer. The Provision was made for the EC2 instance to scale horizontally at the time of peak traffic. The infrastructure was optimized by identifying resources utilization and optimizing the resources appropriately.

PSSPL proposed to migrate the portal application on AWS – Public Cloud services, as a practice and for customer satisfaction executed a POC for 15 days, where the customer could provision multiple servers and host their website and run their marketing campaign from their current setup. Servers were ready in couple of hours instead of days and they could complete their implementation successfully. Post successful POC, we implemented the set up for Production. We addressed the problem statements mentioned by the customer, earlier the infrastructure required re-provisioning to match the demand of the incoming traffic. Auto-scaling feature had to be included in the infrastructure to manage the peak hour’s traffic during the campaigns. Data security was not defined, suggested the importance of the same considering the nature of the business. Data management did not include back-ups and clean-ups, which were then added to the new setup.

The 2 Tier stack viz; application and Oracle DB was deployed in 2 Subnets for Isolation. Required NACL & security Group was applied to ensure required IP’s have access. Application was deployed with auto-scaling in-place to mitigate scalability & availability of application as and when number of users accessing the application increases.

Oracle Database was configured in Multi-AZ which helped automatically provision and maintain a secondary standby DB instance in a different Availability Zone. The primary DB instance is synchronously replicated across Availability Zones to the secondary instance. This approach helped to provide data redundancy and failover support, also to eliminate I/O freezes, and minimize latency spikes during system backups. We also configured A separate Read Replica to provide enhanced performance and durability for RDS database (DB) instances. It made easy to elastically scale out beyond the capacity constraints of a single DB instance for read-heavy database workloads that customer was performing.