Atomstate Implements dynamic environment creation for on-demand testing for TALIC.

The Client

Tata AIA Life Insurance (TALIC), a joint venture between Tata Sons and AIA Life Insurance is one of the largest Indian private life insurers.

The Challenge

TALIC was looking for an automated solution that dynamically spawns new environments with required software to conduct on-demand testing. The environment must be discarded once the testing gets done.

Their biggest issue had been their current UAT environments which is unstable leading to inconsistencies and poor performance. There are various reasons for unstable nature such as application unavailability, wrong configuration in OS, Database, application, etc.

Their previous approach was testing in an unstable environment. Also, applications had inter-app dependencies with other applications. For example, application A can make an API call to other internal application B. The test results of these environments were not consistent due to unstable nature thereby impacting decision making in upstream environments.

The Solution

Atomstate has delivered a provisioning automation solution that has improved the performance of tests and overall aided a better delivery of applications to end consumers.

Our solution has specifically delivered the following

• A version-controlled infrastructure - We have described the infrastructure as a code (IaaC) and version controlled it in code repository. The best practices of application version control like pull requests, merging, etc were applied on infra code with strict role-based access control. The IaaC does all the infra component provisioning like VNets, subnets, computes, etc.
• A version-controlled software provisioning - We have described software as a code and version controlled the manifests in a code repo. The best practices of application version control like pull requests, merging, etc were applied on infra code with strict role-based access control. The manifests do all the user management, web server management, app server management, iptables, etc.
• Delivery via Pipeline - We have set up a pipeline job in Jenkins, and it gets triggered upon pull request. The pipeline invokes Puppet and Terraform to do provision the components. Once the tests are done, the pipeline job discards the environment.
• Robust Logging - The pipeline streams logs of jobs to a time-series datastore to keep the audit posture healthy.
• Dashboarding - We leveraged Grafana to provide dashboarding for higher stakeholders. Various graphs like which puppet manifest was applied when, etc were charted in Grafana.

The Impact

• The higher stakeholders have a dashboard and wallboard views of provisioning updates. Aiding a better understanding and improving communication with their team mates.
• Everything has been described as a code with application version-control best practices. It has improved audit posture with questions like who has changed the infrastructure, etc.
• Improved git commenting for ops provisioning teams to aid better traceability of commits.
• Deployments through a pipeline which has removed manual provisioning, unnecessary server login, and manual configurations.
• Reduced infra costs for TALIC as they don’t need to maintain a 24*7 infrastructure for testing purposes.