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September 09, 2022

Duck Creek insurance core systems provide evergreen SaaS solutions using Windows containers on AKS

Technical Story

Duck Creek Technologies is leading the insurtech disruption, bringing technical innovation to insurance carriers, and its expertise includes helping Microsoft refine its cloud services. Used by top insurance companies, the Duck Creek OnDemand platform delivers a suite of low-code applications for managing all aspects of the property and casualty (P&C) and general insurance life cycle. The platform makes the most of the latest Azure technology, yet newer options are always emerging. Duck Creek saw an opportunity to reduce the operational overhead of its software as a service (SaaS) platform and to improve services for customers. Working in close partnership with Microsoft, Duck Creek adopted Windows containers on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), a fully managed Kubernetes environment. The move significantly reduces time to market of new features and accelerates customer onboarding. Insurance companies benefit from evergreen, always-up-to-date SaaS core systems, allowing them to push their insurtech innovations to market faster.

Duck Creek Technologies

“Building on Azure has enabled us to deliver high availability, scalability, and the security and resiliency that insurers need.”

Quinn Easterbrook, Chief Enterprise Architect, Duck Creek Technologies

A technology leader reexamines the software ‘–ilities’

For six consecutive years, Boston-based Duck Creek Technologies has been a recognized leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for P&C Core Platforms, North America. To maintain its industry standing, Duck Creek takes advantage of the latest in technology, a business advantage that led to a strong initial public offering in 2020 and annual sales in excess of $260 million. In 2022, industry research and advisory firm Celent named Duck Creek a “Luminary”—its highest honor—for Duck Creek’s advanced technology and breadth of functionality.

Forward-thinking insurers and partners use the Duck Creek OnDemand platform to build, deploy, and maintain a variety of insurance products and to provide more personalized experiences to customers, agents, brokers, and internal insurer employees. Configurability is a key part of the platform’s explosive growth. OnDemand’s open architecture and low-code configurability are the building blocks that customers use to develop and launch new insurance products, manage policy administration, handle billing and collections, manage their distribution channels, and support the entire claims life cycle.

According to Duck Creek Senior Enterprise Architect Matt Rosenthal, “Configurability and extensibility are ingrained in our products and in our culture. It’s about giving customers an incredibly flexible product that speeds implementation so they can get to market faster.”

Duck Creek, a winner of the 2022 Microsoft Financial Services Partner of the Year award, has a long history of working with Microsoft. When first creating its cloud platform, Duck Creek used Azure to host its applications on Windows virtual machines (VMs). The global reach of Azure helped the company to expand its services beyond North America into more markets while still providing tailored solutions for insurance carriers. Yet that growth made it impractical to sustain a hands-on approach to infrastructure management.

“As we grew, we quickly identified the difficulties that this approach presented with the ‘-ilities,’” Rosenthal says, referring to cloud benefits such as scalability, operability, extensibility, and availability.

Newer design patterns had emerged since the OnDemand platform entered the market, and one in particular appeared to make applications more efficient to operate and manage. As Rosenthal relates, “It was time to begin breaking down our applications into more consumable services using containers.”

Operable, scalable containers

As a longtime Microsoft partner, Duck Creek became an early adopter of Windows containers on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Instead of using a VM to store and isolate an application and related files, containers package an application and its dependencies as a portable, self-contained unit. Containerized applications can be distributed across multiple VMs, improving scalability while lowering infrastructure costs.

For a .NET shop like Duck Creek, the support for Windows containers in AKS was the green light to optimize OnDemand without needing to rewrite years’ worth of code. AKS is a container management platform that unifies a cluster of machines into a single pool of computing resources. AKS efficiently runs groups of containers and can consolidate multiple workloads onto the same node, improving density while also increasing uptime and availability.

Even when demand increases unexpectedly, Duck Creek can easily scale up a customer’s services and nodes. For Duck Creek customers, real-time demands can change with the weather—as when hurricane season hits—causing insurance claims to rise in affected regions. In the past, Duck Creek engineers had to handle changes in consumption with a more manual process. “Using Windows containers on AKS gave us autoscale capabilities. That's a huge win for scalability and the operability of our solution,” Rosenthal points out.

AKS is based on open-source Kubernetes and benefits from the community mindset, as Duck Creek engineers can attest. They began using Windows containers on AKS before the service was generally available to the public, and Duck Creek provided much-appreciated feedback to the AKS product team.

Duck Creek Chief Enterprise Architect Quinn Easterbrook recalls the challenge of working with preview code, noting, “As early adopters, we pushed the limits of AKS, and our engineers worked closely with Microsoft to refine the service.” Among those refinements: improvements to AKS cluster autoscaling and accelerated networking, an option that lowers latency, reduces jitter, and decreases a VM’s CPU utilization.

“Accelerated networking gives us a significant performance boost, and any performance boost is good, especially if it doesn't require any core changes,” explains Duck Creek Senior Technical  Architect Sandesh Awate.

Duck Creek and Microsoft agree that the close collaboration contributed to each other’s success. “Microsoft is quick to react to our feedback and even quicker to propose better services, capabilities, or other options we might want to consider as we extend our vision,” Rosenthal says. “We love when our Microsoft partners alert us to new technologies or enhancements that they believe will benefit our solution.”

The evolution of an architecture

With containerization as the goal and a full suite of insurance products representing years of development effort, where do you start? According to Rosenthal, “The first part was the hardest—getting the vision defined. But containers were always the plan.”

Duck Creek wanted the fastest path to validating its vision, so the containerization effort began with its Claims product. Insurers use it to manage the entire claims life cycle—from first notice of loss to eventual settlement. From an architectural perspective, Claims was already somewhat modular in nature, making it easier to containerize, and the experienced development team was up for the challenge.

As Awate explains, “We could change the Claims architecture without requiring significant changes in our app code, and that allowed us to pivot on the technology.”

The development team began refactoring the Claims application, packaging services into Windows containers hosted on AKS. They also reworked Party, a supporting application required by Claims and other Duck Creek services. Along the way, the development team looked for ways to take advantage of other Azure managed services. For example, the team created a separate caching service based on Azure Cache for Redis—a pivot that reduces memory requirements.

Changes like this helped Duck Creek meet one of its top goals—to provide an even higher quality product to its customers. Windows containers on AKS support rapid development practices, such as automated release management and continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). Duck Creek can quickly change source code and certify changes across testing and production environments, knowing that the applications run the same source code in all environments. That consistency gives the development teams an additional level of confidence in their testing and quality initiatives.

“Another value proposition in our move to Windows containers on AKS is the speed with which we can update,” adds Rob Savitsky, an OnDemand Product Marketer and Podcast Host for Duck Creek. It’s an important point for an industry that has struggled to keep legacy systems up to date. Duck Creek turns speed into a customer benefit it calls active delivery—the ability to ensure evergreen software and keep customers current, with ongoing updates that offer service enhancements, resolve issues, and provide security and performance improvements.

Savitsky underscores the business value of these architectural changes, observing, “The evolution of our architecture allows us to take the next step forward and set up a new paradigm where we completely eliminate the traditional, big-bang upgrade project with ongoing updates that are automatically pushed out. Active delivery enables insurers to continue business priorities without pause and focus on innovating and creating a new standard of insurance. That’s a big part of why we're moving to Windows containers on AKS.”

The company follows many best practices that reinforce its quality goals. For example, developers use pod anti-affinity rules to isolate workloads and improve security. Another security practice is to use managed identities for Azure resources, including AKS clusters. In addition, all AKS deployments implement health probes that collect telemetry used in monitoring, identifying trends, and proactive alerting.

“The evolution of our architecture allows us to take the next step forward and set up a new paradigm where we completely eliminate the traditional, big-bang upgrade project with ongoing updates that are automatically pushed out…. That’s a big part of why we're moving to Windows containers on AKS.”

Rob Savitsky, OnDemand Product Marketer, Duck Creek Technologies

Rich telemetry improves customer service

In moving to AKS and Azure Managed Services, Duck Creek has seen how better data improves operability. The new OnDemand architecture gives Duck Creek support teams and customers better operational diagnostics, and that’s by design, as Rosenthal points out. “As part of our effort to improve operability, we've been able to significantly increase and improve the telemetry that's pushed out as part of our code base. We can now take advantage of the services within Azure that allow us to interpret those logs and telemetry even more efficiently.”

For example, Duck Creek established new standards for logging and built a framework that uses Azure Event Hubs to organize the data. A real-time data ingestion service, Event Hubs streams millions of events per second.

“Now I have all my applications and related infrastructure funneling important telemetry via various elastic beats to Event Hubs, where I can then organize it and store it in Azure Blob Storage, or present it internally or externally,” Rosenthal explains. Among other enhancements, Duck Creek developers added custom logging functions to the code base as they refactored the Claims and Party applications.

The solution also benefits from the built-in monitoring and logging functions provided by Azure Monitor. Application Insights, a feature of Azure Monitor, provides complete monitoring of applications running on AKS and automatically detects performance anomalies. To drill into the monitoring data, developers and support teams can query Log Analytics.

Taken together, the improvements add to what Rosenthal calls “the cleanliness and the consistency of the solution built on top of Azure.”

An insurtech solution speeds customer innovation to market

The journey to Windows containers on AKS is taking place in stages, and Duck Creek is already seeing the value. The benefits extend beyond lower infrastructure costs, easier management, and a reduced time to market. Duck Creek’s insurtech investments benefit not only customers but also the industry as a whole.

Ultimately, the Duck Creek OnDemand platform is “designed for driving change,” as Easterbrook puts it, enabling insurance carriers to focus on innovation in entirely new ways. “We chose Azure because of the investment Microsoft has put into its cloud and how it constantly takes advantage of new technology, which we at Duck Creek can adopt and pass along to our customers. Building on Azure has enabled us to deliver high availability, scalability, and the security and resiliency that insurers need.”

“Using Windows containers on AKS gave us autoscale capabilities. That's a huge win for scalability and the operability of our solution.”

Matt Rosenthal, Senior Enterprise Architect, Duck Creek Technologies

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