Migrating core systems to the cloud, a charge towards the future

In 2012, world running entered the mobile Internet era, and Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google all deployed mobile terminals. In China, there are 400 million mobile Internet users, and mobile phones have surpassed desktop computers for the first time to become the largest Internet terminal. The development boom of the Internet market is accompanied by the rise of e-commerce platforms, creating an unprecedented direct information channel to consumers. A small screen can see and buy the entire world. Internet insurance has entered people's horizons as a convenient insurance channel. Users can understand and compare different insurance products through the Internet, which greatly reduces information asymmetry and makes information more transparent.

In the same year 2012, Hongkang Life Insurance was established. It adopted a differentiated development strategy and did not use agents to sell insurance. It opened insurance flagship stores on large e-commerce and financial management platforms and used the e-commerce model to sell insurance online, completely realizing "Disintermediation". This is related to the changes in residents’ purchasing habits brought about by the Internet revolution, but more importantly, it can reduce operating costs and improve management efficiency.

Without a sales force to involve its energy, the company focused all its manpower on product development and created a number of hit products. Products such as "Dora A Insurance", "Dabai Term Life Insurance" and "Hongjin Insurance" successively caused quite a stir in the market. The response was, “When a product is first discontinued, the policy will be slipped under the door.”

In 2013, Hongkang Life achieved profitability in the first full year after its establishment and in the second year. Hongkang also broke the rule of "seven losses and eight losses" in life insurance and created a "legend".

Although the sales model of Internet e-commerce helped Hongkang Life achieve rapid early performance growth, at the technical level Hongkang Life did not have a self-sufficient middle-end design and was completely dependent on various Internet platform channels.

This is mainly due to the fact that in the early days of the Internet insurance industry, Internet insurance products were transformed to Internet customers, but the corporate IT architecture was mostly inherited from traditional insurance companies. In order to meet the "high availability" requirements of online platforms and solve the differences in products, transaction processes and business models of each platform, insurance companies have to establish a relatively closed and complete set of small-scale platforms for these large online channels. Trading System.

Since the transaction processes, business models, products, etc. of each channel are different, companies have to face the situation of "many chimneys". Once unified rules are added to the business content, it means that all sales systems must be changed. , its operation difficulty is obvious.

In order to achieve technological breakthroughs and strengthen digital capability building, Hongkang Life Insurance is determined to transform.

There are higher requirements for IT system construction, and the system must consider many aspects such as performance, efficiency, and cost. And cloud computing is beginning to become an option.

In China, cloud computing was initiated by Alibaba Cloud, which was established in 2009. Although Alibaba Cloud's first customer was a financial project that issued small loans to Taobao merchants, financial institutions at that time did not trust domestic cloud computing technology. Wang Runhai, a veteran in the insurance industry, still remembers that during an industry gathering around 2013, everyone accidentally talked about cloud computing, and some people said that private clouds could be used. “When private clouds were mentioned, everyone laughed and thought clouds were still very impractical. idea.”

However, the surging mobile Internet trend has made "Internet +" a hot topic across the country, and a variety of Internet startups such as food delivery, taxi hailing, and life services have begun to "grow rapidly on the cloud." By around 2016, it was almost natural for Internet companies to use cloud technology. It was also in 2016 that Hongkang Life Insurance began to cooperate with Alibaba Cloud.

The seeds were planted.

In 2019, what the company thinks about most is how to transform: it must not only build the company's Internet sales capabilities, but also not rely on Internet marketing channels.

In order to cooperate with the company's strategic transformation, Wang Runhai, who serves as the technical leader, formulated a two-step plan from a technical perspective:

The first step is autonomy, ensuring that the company designs its own products and systems.

The second step is systemization. Under the framework of the "business first" development concept, many management systems in the company are missing, so it is crucial to complete systemization. The next step is to develop on the basis of systemization, both inward and outward. "The system for internal use must continue to be digitalized and intelligent, and the system for external sales must begin to be productized and market-oriented."

In the transformation path, comprehensive cloud migration is an important step in achieving digitalization, but it is not the only option. For example, insurance companies can also choose to build their own big data platform and perform their own ODS big data calculations. However, the cost of building and maintaining such a system is difficult for small and medium-sized insurance companies to bear. Not only that, in terms of the timeliness of data synchronization, data development, and display, the company must prepare and face very complex problems.

In fact, under the general trend of digital development, it is not easy for insurance companies to complete digital transformation. In addition to data consistency issues, the huge amount of data processing is also a major challenge in the "cloud" process. Among them, life insurance companies are particularly challenged. This is because life insurance has a large proportion of long-term customers. Life insurance companies need to maintain customer data throughout the life cycle of 10, 20, 30, or even 50 years.

Taking Hongkang Life's investment insurance products as an example, customers are very sensitive to the net value of the product. This requires the technical department to calculate the net value of each historical policy every day and display it on the front desk. This means that there are high requirements for computing efficiency and data continuity, and the challenges to the cloud platform are self-evident.

The good news is that there are always pioneers exploring. Since 2020, more and more insurance companies, such as China Pacific Insurance Group, China Insurance, New China Insurance, and AIA Life, have started "cloud innovation."

Therefore, Hongkang Life's process of moving from the IDC computer room to "comprehensive cloudization" and then realizing digitalization has demonstration significance for the entire insurance industry.

The dilemma of "many chimneys" that urgently needs to be improved, the objective demands of changes in the industry environment... Faced with various problems, moving to the cloud is imperative. In 2019, Hongkang Life Insurance began planning to launch a comprehensive cloud migration after completing the system reconstruction.

At the beginning of 2021, Hongkang accelerated the pace of "moving to the cloud". Based on the past experience of cooperation with Alibaba Cloud, everyone is convinced of the stability of the cloud, and also feels the convenience brought by the elasticity of the cloud to business agility and cost optimization. In its planning and planning at the end of 2021, Hongkang made the overall cloud migration of its core business an important technical strategic direction for the company in 2022.

Regarding the choice of cloud vendors, Hongkang finally chose Alibaba Cloud, "because we all know that Alibaba Cloud is truly self-developed from scratch."

In addition to self-research, database issues have also become a decisive factor in their choice. The nature of Hongkang Life's business determines that it has extremely high requirements for database performance. This is not only a hard condition set by it alone, but also a common problem faced by the entire industry in moving to the cloud.

Insurance companies have a large number of batch processing tasks. Taking Hongkang Life Insurance as an example, the largest table has hundreds of millions of data, and batch processing needs to be run every night. These batch processing tasks must be completed before the start of business the next day, otherwise it will affect the business progress.

Running batches consumes database performance very seriously. In severe cases, the CPU resource utilization rate was 97%, and it was not completed until 10 o'clock the next day. After comparing the performance of multiple database stress tests, Alibaba Cloud Polar-O database achieved advantages in terms of performance and difficulty in compatibility modification.

After solving the core database problem, in February 2022, the Hongkang technical team and the Alibaba Cloud team began to plan the cloud migration process. The general idea of ​​the whole process is divided into three steps: first install the peripheral system, then install the core system, and then install the dependencies on the core.

System migration was officially launched in April 2022. Migration of non-Oracle-related applications, migration of Oracle-reading applications, migration of imaging systems, and migration of electronic policy systems... everything went smoothly. According to the plan, the migration of key core applications will be completed during the National Day period. Because there is less business volume during the National Day period, downtime and switching of business departments during the cloud upgrade can be avoided, thereby minimizing the impact of the system upgrade on the business. Everyone has chosen the time, and all that's left is the last tremor. Who would have thought that changes would occur.

At noon on October 5, when the Alibaba Cloud team was doing the last data consistency quality check, it was discovered that there were serious risks in the overall data quality of the core library! In the afternoon of that day, Alibaba Cloud urgently gathered core technical personnel to conduct a root cause analysis during the holiday. The conclusion is that after PolarDB-O uses the GBK character set to build the database, the collation (sorting rules) are not consistent with the binary sorting rules on the original Oracle. Therefore, there will be order differences on both sides of the string sorting results, eventually leading to data inconsistency. Alibaba Cloud's comprehensive research and judgment gave a consistent conclusion that the business cutover on October 6 must be suspended.

Based on the previous migration experience, with the help of Alibaba Cloud DTS and Qingtianjian data verification tools, and after optimizing the Polar-O character set, the first round of full data verification was completed on October 26, and the data was all consistent; the second round and the The time taken for three rounds of full data verification was reduced from one week to four days, and the two rounds of full data verification were consistent. After three rounds of full data verification and Qingtianjian field inspection of the cutover window, the business cutover on November 19 The connection perfectly ensures the consistency of all business data.

The switch of Hongkang Life Insurance's IT infrastructure from IDC to the cloud only took more than half a year without stopping the business. It's like flying an airplane while replacing the engine. The difficulty is self-evident. Wang Runhai believes that the reason why this large project can be completed so smoothly is due to the adaptability of Alibaba Cloud's localized cloud system and the trust established in the long-term cooperation between the two parties.

According to Long Xiaoping, Alibaba Cloud Insurance Industry Strategic Account Director, the more critical reason is that Hongkang Life Insurance has been preparing for cloud migration in a planned and systematic manner, and has dismantled and reconstructed the core system in advance, making the entire migration possible. Done successfully.

At present, Hongkang Life's core system includes five major business centers including policy center, claims center, accounting center, transaction center, and product center, and more than 70 sub-business systems have all been migrated.

Hongkang Life's comprehensive cloud migration has brought about intuitive changes. The most direct one is the improvement of system efficiency. It is understood that the batch running efficiency has increased by 1 to 2 times on average compared to before, and in some extreme cases it has increased by 4-5 times. The performance has been greatly improved.

In terms of cost, Wang Runhai said frankly that in the early stage of "cloud migration", the company needs to re-examine and troubleshoot existing equipment, which will increase costs in the short term, but the subsequent costs will soon drop. "For example, in our first round of evaluation, we found that 55 machines can be vacated and 104 machines can be consolidated. Once this is completed, the bill will be reduced next month. That is, we will increase efficiency first and then reduce costs."

Compared with traditional IDC computer rooms, the scalability of the cloud makes costs explicit. Companies can clearly see where they spend more and where they spend less, so they can optimize in a targeted manner. Wang Runhai further elaborated, "The essential difference between building a self-built IDC computer room and the cloud is that the company has the motivation to save resources after using the cloud, because every time a server is saved, the money for one server will be less in the next month's bill. But the IDC computer room There is no such motivation because the machines have been purchased and the cost is fixed.”

From a long-term perspective, "moving to the cloud" is only the first step. In Wang Runhai's mind, to complete digitalization, we must truly independently develop core business systems and form a set of standard new core systems suitable for the current business development model.

"Only a new core system suitable for industry development can improve operational and R&D efficiency. The higher the efficiency of an insurance company, the lower the cost for customers and the better the service. This is our greater wish, and it is also what we will do next after moving to the cloud. Bigger things.”