PURE Insurance successfully transforms its customer and agent systems by migrating to AWS

How we helped

For the migration of PURE Online to Amazon Web Services (AWS), PURE Insurance chose to collaborate with Rackspace Technology. The Rackspace team emphasized agility and a thorough understanding of the challenges, working closely with the PURE Insurance IT team to explore various options.

Utilizing services like Rackspace Elastic Engineering, Modern Operations and Professional Services, Rackspace offered customized support tailored to PURE Insurance’s needs. This support included hands-on guidance through project-based phases, such as acquiring PURE Insurance with AWS and its various features like landing zones, architecture and networks. From the transition's beginning, the Rackspace team provided resources and continued support until a successful cutover, a commitment that remains ongoing.

Special "program parties" were conducted, involving developers and infrastructure personnel to familiarize with the AWS platform. Muhlstein added, "By allowing our people to work in AWS while also receiving support, we made progress visible to all and eliminated much of the resistance and fear." A methodical approach in development and the incorporation of infrastructure as code with Terraform further eased the transition between environments.

Cloud migrations are inherently complex and require meticulous planning, leadership support and strong communication between IT and business stakeholders. Expertise in anticipating and resolving technical issues is crucial, as are robust planning skills to ensure the timely completion of project sprints.

“The Rackspace team provided exceptional knowledge and support throughout the process, allowing us to reach out with any difficulties we experienced,” said Volkan Durakci, Head of Enterprise Architecture at PURE Insurance. “We conducted multiple rehearsals and performance tests prior to go-live, which included a detailed cutover plan. All of this led to a successful and satisfying production weekend.”

The migration also involved the transition from WebSphere application servers to JBoss application servers, and technology enhancements such as implementation of application load balancing and auto-scaling. PURE Insurance’s IT leadership emphasized the role of its quality assurance team as project gatekeepers, ensuring optimal functionality before proceeding.

Inevitably, there will be hiccups in such a complex process, but with the right support and preparation, it can be successful. The PURE Insurance and Rackspace teams worked together effectively to update the technology and resolve issues while project leaders also kept the business informed of the progress and the benefits of moving to the cloud.

PURE Insurance’s collaboration with the Rackspace Modern Ops team allowed consistent support in production environments. After building a successful dev environment using an auto-scaling group, the team earned the customer's trust. Muhlstein playfully wagered 100 push-ups if the team could maintain a successful running environment for three consecutive days. Both parties delivered.

“We installed AppDynamics to monitor performance metrics and Selenium Grid to construct a performance testing framework, giving us more visibility,” said Durakci. “Initially, response times were two seconds, but after examining the metrics, we decreased it to 500 milliseconds. We also implemented several cloud features such as high availability, disaster recovery, blue-green deployments and auto-scaling. Because of the cloud, we see numerous opportunities for continued development.”