Softchoice steers CIG Financial through a DevOps transformation

A Softchoice Case Study

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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