Successfully navigate application server shifts -  Inside CDL’s strategic migration to Payara

Pushing the boundaries of innovation in application development is a must for Insurtech providers whose goal is to deliver competitive advantage for customers, positioning them at the cutting edge of customer experience, operational efficiency and resilience. Succeeding in this goal often requires a full migration to a new application server to create advanced tech capabilities.

When one of the UK's leading technology service providers, CDL, aimed to re-engineer its flagship platform, it opted to migrate to Payara Server Enterprise as the most effective solution to support its goals.

Many Fintech and Insurtech companies recognize the importance of modernizing their IT infrastructure and solutions to drive competitive advantage, agility and compliance with evolving industry standards. Key upgrades often involve migrating to an application server that may be more suitable to address the needs of the software, its end users as well as the platform provider itself. For example, common drivers include limited active development of new functionalities, increasing costs, insufficient support or suboptimal user experience.

Companies may be apprehensive when embarking on such large-scale projects. However, careful planning to ensure compatibility and enhance performance can help minimize concerns, driving a migration’s success while enhancing the capabilities of a business’ offering. This was the case for Manchester-based CDL.

The company builds global enterprise solutions to support multiple aspects of the insurance requisition journey. With a proven track record of delivering state-of-the-art technologies, the Insurtech leader regularly invests in its core systems, including its Strata platform.

As a multi-channel retail platform, Strata lies at the heart of the CDL Insurtech ecosystem, which powers transactions across insurance and financial services markets. With globally recognised cloud capabilities, it delivers innovative and resilient solutions for high volume retail operations and provides a global insurance blueprint, with fully componentised policy administration and core insurance systems. It also offers a suite of cloud-based data and digital services available through powerful APIs, connected hubs and platforms.

Enabling technology to drive growth

As Strata serves 500,000,000 quotes per month, equating to 12,000,000,000 transactions per week, it is paramount for CDL to ensure the software can meet user needs at all times, offering flexibility, performance and cost-competitiveness. When the Insurtech provider began to outgrow its existing application server, CDL chose to migrate to a different one.

Ross McDonald, Software Engineering Manager at CDL, adds: “To strengthen Strata capabilities, we wanted to improve cost-effectiveness and resilience while making sure that Strata could support multiple environments and remain platform independent. With our previous setup, achieving these goals came at an increasing cost and, given our appetite for growth, we wanted to make sure that the business offering remained a competitive proposition for our customers.”

Payara Server Enterprise was identified as the most suitable solution. Besides the economical and flexible licensing option, CDL’s software specialists were confident that it would be easy to port existing functionalities to Payara’s open-source Jakarta EE application server. In addition, the level of expert technical support offered for mission-critical production environments was highly regarded, providing users such as CDL optimized security and stability to maximize customer satisfaction and trust in the Insurtech brand. Payara was also able to provide a solution that was tailored to CDL’s circumstances. It could scale the compute ensuring resilience, without having the extra licensing cost associated with that level of customization.

Compatibility for a seamless transition

The first key step that Payara and CDL took was to get a close look at the proprietary features that Strata’s existing application server used in order to replicate them within the new platform. Fabio Turizo, Service Team Manager at Payara, explains: “Both the existing solution and Payara are based on Jakarta EE set of standards, which are designed to maximize compatibility and portability. However, many vendors add their own unique elements to their specific solutions. As CDL was using a highly vendor-dependent environment, it was important to implement a number of customer-specific enhancements to carry out a smooth migration.”

In particular, CDL needed to be able to deploy and run Strata on Amazon Web Services (AWS). To define a course of action that would address the company’s requirements, expert Payarans visited CDL on site to evaluate the existing application and the migration process itself. During this stage, they identified the vendor-specific elements, reviewed the existing Jakarta EE code to make sure it met the latest standards and defined how to successfully incorporate AWS. Based on their findings, the specialists at Payara compiled a comprehensive document discussing the suggested changes and improvements.

Once the plan was agreed, Payara and CDL worked closely together to ensure a smooth development experience that would support engineers, especially during testing activities. To this end, a deployment environment based on a single-domain admin server was created.

Dave Eyre, Principal Engineer at CDL, comments: “Doing this allowed the team to become familiar with the Payara AsAdmin commands and how to set them. During this phase, we made use of a lot of resources, available through Payara online knowledge base, and the AsAdmin Recorder. This was especially useful to help the team configure elements via the console and help us to learn the different commands and processes.”

Beyond a successful migration

As a result of this collaboration, CDL can now leverage an enhanced Strata platform that is based on a clustered approach. Therefore, the software is now more robust, as each application runs its own container and sudden influx of traffic can be easily handled. In addition, this feature helped CDL deliver a futureproof solution that is highly flexible and can be scaled based on demand without incurring considerable costs.

Ross McDonald, Software Engineering Manager at CDL, comments: “Payara ticked all these boxes for us. It allowed us to move to a cost-effective model that all customers could afford. Even more, they run a resilient system fit for today’s always on world.”

Dave Ellison, Architect at CDL, adds: “A number of factors made Payara’s offering highly attractive technically. These have been proven as we made the switch to this application server.”

Following the successful migration, Payara and CDL remain involved in a close collaboration aimed at enhancing Strata’s capabilities through value-adding, custom upgrades and releases to the Payara Enterprise Server platform. Fabio Turizo concludes: “As a customer-centric business, we are committed to delivering high-quality technologies and services that help our users ‘power up their Jakarta EE applications’. This means engaging in regular discussions to address their evolving needs and support their competitiveness in the marketplace.”