Full technical ownership of the B2B platform for Essent Zakelijk

When we started working on Essent’s B2B platform Unity back in 2016, the system was a large Java legacy platform with over 1 million lines of intertwined code, running on premise. Change was hard, development was expensive and the technical debt was high. Now, Unity is a system based on a modern microservices architecture, running on Kubernetes on AWS, with mature DevOps processes and with a fully automated test regression suite.

Case Overview

The story of the transformation of the Unity system is a story of combining all best practices of Levi9 to achieve high-performing and happy development teams, to ensure that Product Owners can reliably promise the delivery of Epics to their business and for operations to come to low costs of change, low running costs and reliable software quality.

DevOps

Development teams are fully aware of how the system behaves in production. They are able to provision environments in the cloud as they need them. Pipelines and infrastructure are automated to reduce human errors in the process.

Kubernetes on AWS

Migrating from on-premise to AWS reduced costs, and increased flexibility and scalability. Microservices can be deployed without downtime. Kubernetes saves 20% of AWS running costs.

Test automation

Regression testing has been reduced from several days to half a day, using test automation with Cucumber.

Continuous improvement

Technical and organisational initiatives are planned and followed up on a quarter by quarter basis, aiming at improving all hard and soft Key Performance Indicators.

Agile visibility

Agile metrics and continuous improvement, together with microservices and DevOps increased the delivery output and engineering efficiency with 80%.

Microservices architecture

Moving gradually from a monolithic architecture to microservices reduced development time of epics with 33%.

Code quality

Automated code quality controls using Sonarqube and the microservices transformation improved code quality with one full point (as measured by Software Improvement Group)

Business monitoring

Business monitoring allows business users to detect at which moments contracts are most likely to be signed.

Delivering a powerful B2B contracting and billing platform.

Sales, contracting, billing, redelivery and customer lifecycle management, all in a state of the art Java system.