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Softchoice steers CIG Financial through a DevOps transformation
A Softchoice Case Study
—
Overview
1 Softchoice steers CIG Financial through a DevOps transformation
CIG Financial is a specialty auto lender that has served the automotive
industry for over 35 years, providing loans to dealerships and consumers.
The company needed to implement DevOps practices to automate
and standardize its environments, replace its ad hoc processes and
deconstruct its monolithic applications into microservices.
These technical upgrades would increase CIG Financial’s speed to market when offering loans and scaling its business to new customers. Having previously partnered with Softchoice on cloud migration, CIG Financial sought Softchoice’s professional guidance on deploying the infrastructure-as-code (IaC) solution Terraform and more broadly on automating its operations.
IndustryCIG Financial is a specialty lender to the automotive industry.
Business challengesThis company wanted to move on from its monolithic applications and ad hoc approach to software development by pursuing DevOps. It sought better business continuity and operational scalability.
Technology solutions deployed CIG Financial implemented a new continuous integration/continu-ous development (CI/CD) pipeline, automation scripts, and Terraform (for Infrastructure-as-Code), and received Softchoice professional services for DevOps.
Building a better engine for development and growth
2 Softchoice steers CIG Financial through a DevOps transformation
When CIG Financial first engaged with Softchoice, the lender
was in the midst of upgrading its aging IT environments, by
shifting more infrastructure and applications into the cloud.
Softchoice assisted with a Microsoft Exchange upgrade and
Office 365 initial implementation, along with an Azure migration.
By 2020, the Azure transition had progressed substantially and
the CIG Financial team then decided to reach out to Softchoice
for help with DevOps in general and Terraform in particular. This
decision arose from multiple challenges CIG Financial had faced
on the dev side, including:
• An ad hoc approach to development Many projects were entrusted to just one or two people, due
to the small size of CIG Financial’s teams. More importantly,
these developers did not have access to documentation
and project history, which would have helped them
build in a more modern, cloud-friendly and systematic
way. Accordingly, CIG Financial became highly reliant on
individuals, rather than documented best practices.
• Difficulties with monolithic applications CIG Financial had traditionally built monolithic applications
with numerous add-on features. Eventually, these programs
became too unwieldy to manage, as anyone trying to
modify them had to spend significant time attempting to
understand their original code. Only the original developers
really knew offhand how a given application worked.
• Limited scalability for growth This was the key business challenge. Under the monolithic
approach, CIG Financial’s environments had not kept up with
the speed of its business expansion. Scaling its operations
usually required time-consuming configuration of virtual
machines and physical hardware, plus the substantial
licensing costs involved. The company needed to move
more quickly with a continuous integration/continuous
delivery (CI/CD) pipeline and IaC.
CIG Financial also wanted to improve business continuity. In the past, it had suffered interruptions in service from its dependency on the on-premises servers running its most important applications. The company’s transition to the cloud and adoption of DevOps were both meant to improve the reliability of CIG Financial’s operations, by helping it modernize its development processes and mitigate the risks from poorly documented projects and monolithic applications.
“We looked at DevOps as an opportunity to deconstruct these monolithic applications, so that someone who was not familiar with each app’s entire history could understand and change it,” said Mike Pavlin, COO at CIG Financial. “DevOps is a straight-forward way for smaller organizations like CIG Financial to cre-ate change control documentation and implement consistent procedures without too much bureaucracy.”
3 Softchoice steers CIG Financial through a DevOps transformation
Revving up with DevOps automation and Terraform
Softchoice initially worked with CIG Financial
on scripts to automate its infrastructure. The
collaboration culminated in the creation of a
DevOps environment with a CI/CD pipeline
that would automate the company’s tests
and deployments. Softchoice provided the
“scaffolding” for this new setup and CIG
Financial built out the rest.
CIG Financial had focused on setting up Terraform as
well, to standardize how it managed its cloud services
by using IaC to produce consistent, predictable, and
safe environments with declared configurations.
Terraform is an IaC solution that uses human-readable
HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) to express
how infrastructure will work. With Terraform in place,
CIG Financial’s developers have the tools they need for
building quickly and efficiently, in line with the company’s
need to move quickly and confidently in providing loans to
its customers.
“Terraform lets us see historical deployments, roll back
changes as needed, and use automated scripts without
having to be physically present at a site and do everything
manually,” explained Duong Chiem, senior systems engineer
at CIG Financial. “There was probably a tenfold productivity
boost from not having to expend so much time testing
and deploying every piece of code by hand like we had
done before.”
DevOps enables CIG Financial to deconstruct its monolithic
applications into microservices, which are loosely coupled
services that can be managed more easily and with less
risk than a complex monolithic architecture. The relatively
small CIG Financial team can now quickly fix issues without
necessarily having to know every detail of the architecture or
understand what the original developers had in mind.
“Terraform lets us see historical deployments, roll back changes as needed, and use automated scripts without having to be physically present at a site and do everything manually.”
— Duong Chiem, Senior Systems Engineer, CIG Financial
4 Softchoice steers CIG Financial through a DevOps transformation
CIG Financial now has the DevOps automation it needs to support
its business operations and continue serving as a trusted lender for
its customers. Using its CI/CD pipelines, microservices, and tools like
Terraform, the organization’s developers can manage its infrastructure
and applications more predictably and efficiently than ever before.
The Softchoice relationship has been integral to this transformation, helping CIG
Financial become a more agile organization with improved business continuity
and scalability.
“We expect to re-engage Softchoice for more assistance on this project as we
move forward because they’ve got the skills, they’ve got the experience, and
they’ve got the resources that we need to solve our problems,” explained Pavlin.
“We expect to re-
engage Softchoice
for more assistance
on this project as
we move forward
because they’ve got
the skills, they’ve
got the experience,
and they’ve got the
resources that we
need to solve our
problems”
Destination: automation (and business continuity)
— Mike Pavlin,
COO at CIG Financial.
5 Softchoice steers CIG Financial through a DevOps transformation
The customerCIG Financial is a boutique specialty auto lending
company that has been serving dealerships and
consumers for decades. Headquartered in California, it
has gradually upgraded its IT environments over the years
through cloud modernization, and has most recently
pursued DevOps automation.
The original askThis company wanted to standardize and automate its
development processes, while moving away from the
riskier and slower approach it had been taking with its
monolithic applications. DevOps provided a general
framework for doing so. CIG Financial also wanted to
implement Terraform, an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool.
The Softchoice valueSoftchoice, helped CIG Financial optimize their
infrastructure through cloud migration and guided the
company in the transition to DevOps. CIG Financial’s IT
environments are now capable of supporting its growth
and ensuring it can keep serving its customers in the
automotive sector.
About CIG Financial
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