Delta Dental of California transforms claims processing with Azure Local, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Modernizing a business-critical system

Throughout its more than 50-year history, Delta Dental of California has created millions of smiles, connecting Americans with comprehensive, high-quality oral healthcare benefits and building a strong network of dental providers. Its IT teams are dedicated to uncovering the benefits of different technology and using it to streamline enterprise systems and processes. As the company started experimenting with more cutting-edge capabilities and planning infrastructure for the future, it also began to evaluate using the cloud to better support development work. “As an insurance company, we always prioritize data privacy. We wanted to enable data protection and maintain control over where we host data, so we decided to keep our back end data on-premises while shifting perspectives and moving forward toward the cloud,” explains Sundar Pasupathy, Senior Manager, System Engineering at Delta Dental of California.

That back end is better known as MetaVance—Delta Dental of California’s business-critical payor system that handles around 1.5 million transactions per day, including claims from 14 additional states—which was rewritten for hosting in Kubernetes clusters. Until recently, the processing engine was hosted on HP-UX on Intel’s Itanium architecture. “When Intel discontinued the Itanium platform, it was a huge driver for us to upgrade MetaVance, and we chose to move forward with containerized, modernized applications,” says Andrew Irving, Solutions Architect at Delta Dental of California. The company was also interested in modernizing to try to reduce costs associated with its legacy applications, increase revenue, add flexibility to scale quickly, and enhance security.

Uniting its visions for a partial cloud migration and broader application modernization, Delta Dental of California started comparing different hybrid cloud vendors and features side by side. It prioritized support and security for Kubernetes when deciding on a cloud provider and landed on Microsoft Azure and its adaptive cloud approach. Delta Dental of California had worked with Microsoft on applications in the past, which helped prove how an Azure adaptive cloud approach could function, how the company could mold its hybrid needs around the all-up cloud functionality of Azure, and how to tap into the existing product knowledge shared by IT staff, architects, analysts, engineers, and operations teams. “Using Azure, we could keep MetaVance on-premises, keep it close to our Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), and modernize it in a way that meant we could take a journey to the Azure cloud platform in the future when the rest of the pieces fall in line,” says Irving. “The driver for us was to make MetaVance cloud friendly, even though it wasn’t cloud friendly yet.”

To achieve containerization at scale, Delta Dental of California evaluated various Kubernetes platforms, including pure Kubernetes and OpenShift. The company chose Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) because it was already aligned to Azure and was closest to Kubernetes out of the box. It also had the advantage of being managed by Microsoft, which helped reduce its overhead, with all the cloud-native services and components needed to host its existing UI, API, service, and data access object (DAO) layers available from one provider. Staying within the Azure portfolio, Delta Dental of California identified Azure Stack HCI (now part of Azure Local), as a pathway to connect its containerized MetaVance workloads to Azure while enjoying cloud capabilities that help improve performance and efficiency. “For the volume of traffic MetaVance handles, Azure Local is one of the very few installations we found already servicing millions of customers and transactions every day,” says Pasupathy.

Claiming a technology victory: The best of the cloud on-premises

With interest in the cloud continuing to build internally, Delta Dental of California still required on-premises data residency, so it saw Azure Local as the best of both worlds—an extension of Azure on-premises with the same connectivity, management, and operations. And with Azure Arc–enabled Kubernetes, it could run MetaVance as a containerized, modernized app, exactly as originally planned. Delta Dental of California’s development environments are now hosted in the cloud using AKS, while its production environments are run on-premises with AKS on Azure Local and Windows Server. The company aims to modernize the bulk of its application stack and gradually move it toward Azure.

Although Kubernetes is generally a microservices platform, MetaVance is anything but. The payor system occupies 20 servers and five different physical clusters, all containerized with AKS. “As MetaVance continually evolves and our business does great things with it, we have room to grow with AKS,” says Irving. “When we’re ready to do an upgrade, we just deploy a whole new workload cluster for every environment. That has reduced downtime to an absolute minimum for our development staff, our application staff, and our customers. We don’t have to worry about spending hours trying to tweak, troubleshoot, or recover a failed cluster because it’s now 30 minutes from greenfield to a full-blown Kubernetes cluster, so it’s very quick and extremely flexible.”

In addition to using AKS clusters as a stepping stone to evolve the MetaVance platform, Delta Dental of California wanted to improve container orchestration management, which has historically been challenging. “We were running everything in Docker containers, and there was a lot of manual work in terms of scaling and managing these microservices running between different teams,” explains Pasupathy. “AKS helped us take care of all those things and automate our management of microservices. Our developers are now feeling very confident moving forward.”

This added confidence pushed the company to lead a number of ambitious IT transformation initiatives, including one early in the engagement to migrate close to 400 virtual machines (VMs) from a competing cloud provider to Azure within three months—without third-party support. Delta Dental of California managed a seamless migration using Azure Migrate and a development and integration testing environment. The company also received dedicated support from the Azure Migrate and Modernize program and FastTrack for Azure team to inspect its landing zone and coordinate best practices.

Supercharging and fine-tuning using cloud-native services

Delta Dental of California has supercharged existing capabilities and unlocked new ones as the full range of benefits come together within its environment. The company uses Azure Front Door Premium as a modern cloud content delivery network for all its external applications and configures web application firewall policies to control application access. It hosts all its APIs with Azure API Management through a simpler process than it has previously experienced. It manages messaging between different applications with Azure Service Bus and uses Azure Cache for Redis for caching some of those applications. It’s also using Azure Application Gateway with every AKS cluster and Azure Application Gateway Ingress Controller within those clusters, and it uses Azure App Service for running the UI layer of all its applications. “From a leadership perspective, when we take our applications to Azure, the idea is not to run them on VMs. We want to use cloud-native services to the extent possible,” says Pasupathy.

On top of this already extensive list, Delta Dental of California created never-before-experienced visibility into its environment using both Application Insights in Azure Monitor and Azure Monitor Logs, helping it make proactive infrastructure updates and avoid potential disruptions. “When we’re talking about Azure Monitor Logs and Application Insights, one of the interesting things that happened during this modernization project was that we had more data available than we’ve ever had, and Kubernetes compounds upon that,” says Irving. “We know about problems that the old platform wouldn’t have exposed, such as throughput rates and latency in some very specific transaction scenarios. So, we can now fine-tune things at a much more granular level than before, which is great.”

Functioning and flourishing with improved throughput and smooth operations

Delta Dental of California’s cloud migration and app modernization efforts have not just significantly improved the performance and reliability of MetaVance but also transformed the company’s full range of IT infrastructure. “The throughput between the old system and new system has increased dramatically,” notes Irving. This helps the company to better serve its customers while supporting its mission of providing high-quality dental insurance coverage.

As ongoing proof of this project’s success, the company also points to the simple fact that with Azure Local and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), MetaVance is up and running better than before. Given that success, Delta Dental of California expects its Azure Local presence to grow, and it’s in the early stages of planning future Azure rollouts, including moving additional applications to Azure and using Azure Arc for managing VMs and servers enterprise wide. Says Irving, “Azure Arc fits into our tagging strategy for our VMs and servers, and we can then look at opportunities for additional Azure Arc features after that, including for patching and compliance.” He concludes, “We have successfully been in production on this modernized platform for more than a year now, and our business is not only functioning but flourishing with Azure Local as a key driver for the business.”

Discover more about Delta Dental of California on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X/Twitter, and YouTube.