Die Challenge

The insurance “Smile” is well-known as the biggest online insurance in Switzerland. Their cloud-first strategy includes the migration of their applications to the AWS cloud. This case study describes the cloud migration of a core application of Smile.

The «customer facing application» helps Smile customers to calculate their insurance in various areas (e.g. car, home, motorbike), request an offer and/or conclude a contract online.

The motivation for the migration to AWS were, among others, performance difficulties of the previous architecture, as well as the slow responsiveness to evolving customer needs.

The implementation was carried out in close cooperation between Smile Insurances and Axians Amanox.

The Solution

  • The main components of the application contain the Fargate Containers which run the application code with the data being stored in an Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS). Also, several Lambda functions are used to execute the application.
  • In front of them, there’s a load balancer which balances traffic for the containers.
  • Multiple security related services are implemented, but not visible here.
  • The infrastructure was implemented using Infrastructure as Code, for this purpose the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) was used.

The architecture diagram below visualizes the implemented AWS architecture:

 

smile

Tools & Technologies

The following list of AWS services shows a selection of the used AWS services:

  • Networking & Content Delivery: Amazon VPC, Amazon CloudFront, Amazon Route53, Amazon API Gateway
  • Compute: AWS Fargate, AWS Lambda
  • Database: Amazon RDS
  • Storage: Amazon Elastic File System (EFS), AWS Backup

Conclusion

The cloud migration of the application includes the following benefits for Smile:

  • New features can be released way faster than before
  • Application is highly available
  • International scalability is ensured
  • Costs are optimized
  • AWS is on a path to powering their operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025

 

smile

CUSTOMER: Smile Insurances
Smile is the insurance without blah-blah and a successful online insurance company in Switzerland and Austria with over 185,000 customers. As a complementary business model to traditional insurance, the insurtech offers users and customers the best digital insurance experience, with fair rates, best service and everything is 100% online.

 

PARTNER: AWS
As AWS Advanced Consulting and training partner, we support Swiss customers on their way to the cloud. Cloud-native technologies are part of our DNA. Since the company’s foundation (2011), we have been accompanying cloud projects, implementing and developing cloud-based solutions.