About the Client
Zego provides flexible insurance solutions for business vehicles. Since its inception in 2016, it’s protected more than 200,000 vehicles for thousands of businesses, from sole traders to fleets to global corporates.
We were appointed to handle a cloud-to-cloud migration to foster better harmony between systems after Zego’s acquisition of a telematics company. Our improvements also led to faster processing times and more consistent performance and scalability across the entire estate.
Challenge: Cloud-to-Cloud Migration Poses Technical Challenges
Zego acquired market-leading telematics company Drivit in December 2020 to further enhance its vehicle insurance services with real-time driver data. Both businesses were cloud-based, but they used different platforms and Drivit’s cloud environment didn’t involve the same level of automation as Zego’s.
As part of the post-acquisition integration, the decision was taken to migrate Drivit’s applications from Azure to reside in Zego’s AWS environment. However, cloud-to-cloud migration involves more than a simple transference of data from one environment to another. The process can be highly complex and resolving differences between cloud platforms’ resources often requires deep technical knowledge.
Since Zego’s team was unfamiliar with Azure, we were appointed to handle the process. Our brief also included the removal of single points of failure from Drivit’s Azure estate.
“We knew that migrating from Azure to AWS was going to be a challenging task. However, [this collaboration meant] we were able to overcome technical difficulties and achieve our goals. With knowledge of both cloud environments, the team brought valuable experience and insights.”
Bart Swedrowski
Director of Systems Engineering at Zego
Solution: An Expert-led Approach
Initially, we conducted an Inception workshop to ascertain Zego’s goals, priorities and constraints. Since the migration had to be completed within a tight timeframe, we quickly progressed to more detailed Discovery and Design workshops, enabling us to begin engineering work.
Foundations were built in AWS in line with Zego’s current set-up and AWS Well-Architected principles. From here, we moved on to more complex aspects of the project involving large quantities of data and business critical applications.
We migrated five PaaS databases (MSSQL and PostgreSQL) using a combination of AWS DMS and CLOUDBASIX SQLReplica for Amazon RDS SQL Server. Drivit’s use of Azure SQL made the replication of the MSSQL database more complex, which ruled out the use of AWS DMS for some workloads.
Additionally, we transferred tens of millions of files (55Tb of data) into S3 buckets, enabling Zego to review its storage classifications. We expect this quantity of data to be eligible for Amazon S3 Glacier, a secure, durable and extremely low-cost storage class for archiving and long-term backup.
The data migration involved the creation of a novel event-driven solution to ensure near real-time replication of data objects. This proved to be game-changing as it decoupled the migration of backend services from mobile application updates.
Outcome: A Seamless Migration with Added Benefits
As processing moved into AWS, Zego’s team reported that it was much faster. Following the migration, the test window was reduced by 50 percent.
What’s more, with us handling the engineering aspects of build and migration, Zego was able to prioritise onboarding people as they shifted to more product-focused delivery teams. This ensured all staff understood the new technology and processes, giving them greater confidence. Zego is now in a strong position to leverage the performance and scalability benefits of AWS across its entire estate.
“We would never have achieved this successful migration without such an incredible joint effort. The tenacity and perseverance of the cloud engineers made all the difference when we encountered challenges. What an amazing team!”
Paolo De Luca
Senior Engineering Manager at Zego
This case study is based on work completed by DevOpsGroup before the team joined forces with Sourced Group, an Amdocs company.
