Fetch Pet Insurance

Fur-well to legacy Cloud platforms. Hello AWS.

Fetch Pet Insurance is a New York City-based pet insurance company, best known for providing comprehensive pet insurance policies. They have developed a ground-breaking, patent-pending technology called Fetch Forward^TM, which uses 150 million data points from 16 years of clinical health findings to provide Fetch Pet parents with tailored insights and topical recommendations.

Frustrated with sub-optimal performance, reliability, and efficiencies with their existing legacy GCP Cloud platform, Fetch Pet Insurance were keen to modernise and migrate to a platform with greater scalability and feature sets. Impressed by GlobalLogic’s deep expertise in product engineering and long-standing partnership with AWS, Fetch Pet Insurance chose GlobalLogic to help modernise their key product offerings.

Customer Challenge

As with other types of insurance, pet insurance companies must navigate high claim costs, data management and the standardisation of policies. They also have the additional challenge of market attrition. Not only does Fetch Pet Insurance have to convincingly sell the value of its service to a reluctant audience, they have to make sure the customer experience lives up to what is being promised.

Being a predominately app-based business, it was paramount to Fetch Pet Insurance to have a cloud-based platform that provides a seamless digital customer experience, without costing the earth. They also wanted end-to-end insight into the lifecycle of a transaction.

GlobalLogic recommended a migration to AWS cloud services. Not only does AWS have built-in intelligence to support data analytics and security, the platform can be customised to meet business needs and offers a pay-as-you-go pricing model, allowing customers to only pay for the resources they use.

Migration to AWS

To ensure all business needs were captured and accelerators realised early in the process, GlobalLogic completed a joint planning session with Fetch Pet Insurance. This session engaged key stakeholders and built out a roadmap for two consecutive programs of work.  These programs of work supported an overarching objective to refactor the existing monolith application, to a cloud-native microservices based, omni-channel digital platform; all built upon AWS.

The first program adopted a DevOps approach to operationalising the complex setup using opensource, AWS native and APM tools (AWS Cloudwatch, AWS X-Ray, EKS (Kubernetes), PagerDuty, Slack AWS SNS, EFK, Prometheus and DataDog, AWS Control Tower). This involved sprint cycles and feedback loops to continually test and improve on work completed.

To ensure a successful migration, our engineers followed a two-phased execution methodology:

1. Initial implementation provisioned: Network, Compute, Storage, IAM and Kubernetes
2. With Infrastructure as Code (IaC) enhancements: Secrets management, API Gateway, ECR, ELB/NLB, Database, Message Bus and Elasticache

These steps enabled applications from the agent and client portals, sales funnel and mobile app to be migrated and modernised from Monolith to Microservices based architecture on AWS cloud. The backend, which was running on a legacy system on Google Cloud, was migrated to AWS too.

Joint efforts from GlobalLogic Delivery & Practices lead to a successful implementation of IaC for AWS environments using OpeNgine – a comprehensive, integrated DevOps solution that automates cloud infrastructure setup, installs tools, and jump-starts CICD pipelines.

Both the environment setup process with CI/CD and required AWS services, as well as the Jenkins integration with tools like Vault, Sonarqube and Artifactory were also successfully automated across three sprints:

• Sprint I -CI/CD and Backend services – Fully functional accelerated implementation with OpeNgine – typically less than 2 weeks.
• Sprint II – CI/CD and Partial IaC automation: Fully functional accelerated implementation typically in 3 days
• Sprint III – CI/CD and IaC automation: Fully functional accelerated implementation typically in under 8 hours

The second program of work built on the success of the migration to a microservices-based architecture. Looking specifically at providing end to end insight into transactional logs, GlobalLogic designed, implemented and operationalised hands off real-time monitoring & alerting for more than 50 microservices to the end client. To support the diagnosis of application performance problems in real-time, DataDog APM and logging/tracing were implemented into the AWS platform.

What value did GlobalLogic bring?

Based on proven technologies and GlobalLogic’s accumulated experience, Fetch Pet Insurance benefited from the use of digital accelerators to drastically reduce the implementation timeline from months to weeks. In fact, without our partnership, we predict the greenfield implementation to have taken an additional 6-9 months for the Go-Live.

Our uniquely collated partner ecosystem and commitment to delivering transformational value means that our clients benefit from the best-in-class tools and platforms. We also spend time transferring knowledge to in-house talent, so value-add activity continues after we’re gone.

AWS is just one of our partners offering a transformative next step for clients. Thanks to the versatility of the AWS platform and its ability to support multi-channel experiences, Fetch Pet Insurance now has full transparency over its customers’ journeys – from policy purchase to claims submission and processing. A modernised Cloud solution has also resolved issues around performance, scalability, reliability, cost, and efficiencies, and enabled Tech Pet Insurance to carry forward their Fetch Forward^TM IP with modernised tools.

In fact, in just four months, Fetch Pet Insurance not only completed a successful migration of their existing functions to AWS, they gained new capabilities in:

• Operational efficiencies – Optimised IT infrastructure using the right sizing and autoscaling, resulting in a 30% reduction in IT Cost per policy.

• Observability – Custom dashboards of all accumulated data, which gives a visualisation of real time spike on graphs from a single platform (ScreenBoard). The solution included implementing inter transaction correlation ID’s, proactively preventing/reducing future issues (MTBF – Mean time between failures) by 25%.
• Notifications – Multi-stage alerts based on configurable thresholds. This was made possible due to integrations with other tools like PagerDuty, Slack and AWS.
• Remediation – Detect threats in real-time across Fetch Pet Insurance’s applications, network, and infrastructure with security monitoring. Allowing Fetch Pet to deploy new features / patches faster, for example delivering a 40% improvement on Release Deployment Cycles, a reduction from 5.15 hours to under 2 hours.
• Monitoring – Real-time monitoring of application performance, synthetics – such as UX across the digital landscape – and infrastructure to collect data on resource utilisation.

The success of this project has inspired Fetch Pet Insurance to look at building an automated Disaster Recovery Environment in new regions.