Introduction
At BCA AG, a cloud strategy is to be increasingly implemented, with PCG X AWS supporting.
About BCA
BCA
is a provider of services and solutions tailored to the challenges and business of brokers. To this day, BCA is committed to providing unaffiliated brokers and independent agents with comprehensive and personal support.
The Challenge
BCA wants to provide its services flexibly on a cloud-native infrastructure. The aim of the deployment is to integrate as many cloud-based services as possible in order to minimize the administrative effort and automate the deployment.
The new architecture provides for a division of the program code or the entire API into the respective functionalities. The goal is to minimize the code base to the actual task while using the ideal technical solution.
The goal is to enable the customer, after the initial provision of the infrastructure components, to be able to provide new versions of the (web) services in a fully automated and flexible manner. The prerequisite for automatic provisioning is that no adjustments to the infrastructure are required in order to roll out the service in an executable manner.
The Solution
The target architecture is built in three stages and uses at its core the AWS service "ECS", a fully managed AWS service.
Containerized applications can be operated with the help of ECS. The individual containers are stateless, which enables horizontal scaling. Load distribution is handled by an application load balancer. The data layer is formed by an Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL database, as well as a DynamoDB and various S3 buckets. The infrastructure is deployed using the IaC (Infrastructure as Code) solution AWS CDK (Cloud Development Kit). The logic of the container release deployments is mapped using a parameter store. A CI/CD pipeline on the customer side fills an image repository (AWS ECR) with the necessary images and sets the desired container version in a parameter. Then, an automated AWS CodePipeline deployment deploys the desired version of the container.
The environment is managed and further developed by PCG's AWS Business Unit. Both the operation with incident management, monitoring etc. as well as the support to deploy further services on AWS.
Results and Benefits
The high degree of automation enables the customer to independently publish new releases of its applications in a short time through various stages of the release process. The BCA employees are greatly relieved in the operation and can concentrate on development topics.
About PCG
Public Cloud Group (PCG) supports companies in their digital transformation through the use of public cloud solutions.
With a product portfolio designed to accompany organisations of all sizes in their cloud journey and competence that is a synonym for highly qualified staff that clients and partners like to work with, PCG is positioned as a reliable and trustworthy partner for the hyperscalers, relevant and with repeatedly validated competence and credibility.
We have the highest partnership status with the three relevant hyperscalers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, and Microsoft. As experienced providers, we advise our customers independently with cloud implementation, application development, and managed services.