Physicians Mutual, a 117-year-old Nebraska-based insurance company, had worked on modernizing its systems for over a decade. In such a complex industry, any IT refresh can seem like a never-ending journey. The existing application architecture made it difficult to scale or refresh applications individually. Everything was bundled, forcing the IT team to take a "one size fits all" approach that limited legacy modernization and business agility. To "untie" the bundle and create a more agile and responsive environment, the IT team determined that containerization and Dev/Ops were the answer. In 2017, the company piloted a microservice architecture and an automated pipeline on Docker Engine (CE) to deliver the new corporate API. Following the successful pilot, the company relaunched 11 mission critical services on Docker Enterprise, paving the way for a complete transformation of the company's application architecture. In this session, you'll learn: <About the journey of transitioning the corporate API from traditional application server deployment to containerized Microservices on Docker Enterprise <How the company built consensus and kept momentum in an enterprise environment <About the technologies and frameworks used, including log aggregation, system monitoring, and security <About key business benefits in agility and responsiveness achieved

1. NATHAN COBERLY
VP – Application Development
Physicians Mutual
Modernizing Insurance:
The Physicians Mutual Journey

2. About Me

3. The early days…
Assorted Images: Public Domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/

4. Early Java / J2EE
EAR
EAR
EAR
EAR
EAR
EAR
EAR
EAR
EAR
IBM WebSphere 6.1
JARJARJAR
JARJARJAR
Shared Lib “folder”
JARJARJAR
IBM Java SDK 5
JARJARJAR
JARJARJAR
IBM System Libs
JARJARJAR
Java
App
VB
App
Java
App
circa
2006

5. EAREAR
EAR
EAREAR
EAR
EAREAR
EAR
IBM WebSphere 7
JARJARJAR
JARJARJAR
JARJARJAR
IBM Java SDK 6
JARJARJAR
JARJARJAR
IBM System Libs
JARJARJAR
EAR
EAR
EAR
EAR
EAR
EAR
EAR
EAR
EAR
Ant / Project Dep
Message Broker / ESB
SOAP
RMI
SOAP
MQ
JMS
RMI
SO
A?
sort of…
circa
2010

6. EAREAR
EAR
EAREAR
EAR
EAREAR
EAR
IBM WebSphere 9
JARJARJAR
JARJARJAR
JARJARJAR
IBM Java SDK 8
JARJARJAR
JARJARJAR
IBM System Libs
JARJARJAR
EAREAR
EAR
EAR
EAR
EAR
EAREAR
EAR
Gradle / Nexus
REST
REST
JMS
REST
REST
EAREAR
EAR
EAR
EAR
EAR
EAREAR
EAR
Message Broker / ESB
EAR
EAR
EAR
Too
little
Too
late
circa
2017

7. Legacy SOA / J2EE Architecture
• Tight coupling
• "one size fits all" application server
• Interoperable Webservices? Ha!
• Monolithic architecture
• Dependency Hell

8. Charting a New Course
• Lightweight RESTful Corporate API
• Open technologies (vendor independent)
• Domain Driven Design (DDD) *
• Containerized
• Semantic Versioning (consume when ready!)
• Auto Delivery Pipeline (release when ready!)
*Evans, E. (2014). Domain-driven design: Tackling complexity in the heart of software (21st ed.). Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley.

9. The Pilot
• A small, but significant start
• Docker Engine (Community)
• 7 full stack applications
• WebSphere Liberty
• JBoss
• Angular, nodeJS / Strongloop
• Nginx!!!

10. Launching & Sustaining
Momentum
Photo: Spacex. https://www.flickr.com/photos/spacex/39337245145

11. Launching & Sustaining the Initiative
• Answering the unasked question, "What's in it for
me?“ WIIFM
-- Ops, Dev, Change Management, Business
• Create intentional collaboration...
and some competition
FOMO

12. Simplify the Complex

13. Highlight its Strengths

14. In Business Terms

15. Expert Guidance
Image: Pixabay. Editorial Use. https://pixabay.com/photos/wizard-gandalf-lego-magic-sorcerer-2021410/

16. Outcomes
• 22 stacks, 38 services, 122 Containers
• Enhanced High-availability
• Daytime Deployments
• Enhanced Monitoring & Troubleshooting
• Consistency

17. Frameworks & Technologies Used
• Docker Engine (Enterprise)
• OpenJDK 8 alpine
• Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash (ELK stack) + logspout
• Prometheus, Grafana
• Jenkins
• Nginx!!!

18. REST
REST
REST
REST
circa
2019
JARJARJAR
JARJARJAR
JARJARJAR
Gradle / Nexus
Open JDK 8
Alpine Linux
Spring Beans
Spring Security
Spring Actuator
Spring Web
Spring Data
policies_api: 2.0.0
Docker Trusted Registry
api api api
Node 1 Node 3Node 2 Node 4
Load Balancer
nginx
Docker Engine - Swarm
nginx nginx nginx

19. gitpush
webhook dockerpush
dockerpull
Gitlab
Jenkins
Docker
Trusted
Registry
Docker
Engine
Enterprise
Developer
plugin/api
git
stackdeploy

20. Independently Releasable Feature
master
2.0.0
feature/us33964-add-widget X

21. Accumulating Feature
for Coordinated Release
2019feb
feature/us339-add-widget X
master
2.0.0
X X
X

22. References
Evans, E. (2004). Domain-driven design: Tackling
complexity in the heart of software.
Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley
Mouat, A. (2015). Developing and Deploying
Software with Containers.
Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media, Inc