Since 1994, GWVS (Gesellschaft für Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungsservice) mbH has provided comprehensive accounting and administration services, as well as customized and innovative IT solutions, for TELIS Group’s financial services companies. Approximately 2,000 consultants, brokers and cooperation partners throughout the TELIS Group rely on GWVS’s online advisory tools in their daily work. Among its many functions, GWVS’s IT systems generate around 2 million offers for customers and clients annually, managing over 100 million pages of digital contract documents.
At-a-Glance
GWVS operates the IT infrastructure for the TELIS financial services group and develops software solutions used daily by over 2,000 advisers, brokers and cooperation partners. Aspiring to deliver advanced services, the company is digitizing its entire advisory process and accelerating workflows with a new generation of applications using artificial intelligence (AI) and Kubernetes. To ease the transition to a modern, container-based application architecture, GWVS relies on the Rancher Prime enterprise container management platform, which enables fully automated deployments and fast, secure delivery of innovative capabilities.
Digitizing the end-to-end advisory process
The TELIS business model relies on a systematic and holistic advisory process. The TELIS system treats each private household as a small business, creating financial freedom through a comprehensive review of potential savings. This advisory approach aims to enable customers to increase savings by 10% of their net income.
In 2020 the TELIS Group launched a growth strategy, known as VISION 2025, to increase its number of consultants by at least 50% and expand its number of locations to 600 by the year 2025. To achieve these objectives effectively, the group relied on GWVS to digitize its advisory processes.
The first step on this path, GWVS introduced a digital financial analysis tool that includes features like capturing data with a digital photo. Advisers photograph new customers’ existing contracts with a smartphone and transmit that image directly to the back office at TELIS Group headquarters through an app. This process accelerates the creation of digital financial reports with the help of AI, providing clients and advisers with an intuitive user experience.
To implement this functionality and other innovations, GWVS is gradually expanding the group’s central advisory platform, known as the TELIS Online System (TOS).
“Until now, our advisory services were based on classic monolithic software that we developed several years ago,” explains Andreas Butschan, team leader for system integration at GWVS. “Our developers are now detaching individual functional modules from this construct, modernizing them and creating the conditions for an agile digital advisory process.”
“Rancher Prime plays a crucial role in the complete digitalization of our advisory process and simplifies the integration of AI technologies for even more innovative services.”
Modernizing application architecture with Rancher Prime
GWVS development teams collaborate closely with TELIS financial advisers to evolve key business applications. “Our developers translate consulting and sales requirements into software code,” says Butschan.
Therefore, it was the developers who drove the need for new tools and methodologies to modernize core applications. Their primary goal was to automate new application version deployments, making innovative features (like analyzing digitally captured contract documents with the support of AI) available to consultants more quickly.
“Manually deploying services required more effort from us developers,” says Christian Flessa, senior developer at GWVS. “It sometimes felt like we spent more time planning and executing deployments than developing new features.”
As a result, GWVS started exploring microservices, containers and Kubernetes. After successfully deploying the first small web applications using Docker containers, GWVS quickly realized the benefits of this approach. Containerization would enable GWVS to redevelop the TOS functions as modular microservices and deploy them quickly, platform-independently.
However, the GWVS operations team faced new challenges when implementing its container strategy. “During our first attempts to install Kubernetes clusters from scratch, we quickly reached our limits,” recalls Martin Ruckdäschel, system administrator at GWVS. “It became immediately clear that we needed a container management platform to run the new application environment efficiently and securely. During our research, we discovered Rancher Prime.”
Rancher Prime is designed to simplify enterprise adoption of a container strategy. The 100% open source platform streamlines the deployment and management of Kubernetes clusters, providing comprehensive capabilities for building, deploying and scaling containerized applications.
GWVS participated in several Rancher Rodeo workshops to evaluate the platform’s capabilities firsthand. “Once we realized that we could master the balancing act between agile development and stable operations with Rancher Prime, we quickly decided to use the solution productively,” says Butschan.
GWVS rapidly constructed its first two clusters with Rancher Prime: a four-node development cluster and a seven-node cluster for production workloads.
“Rancher Prime’s intuitive user interface allowed us to get started without a lot of prior knowledge,” says Ruckdäschel. “Its cluster management capabilities are largely self-explanatory, and many key functions, such as monitoring via Prometheus, are built right into the solution. We also appreciated how easily we could connect our existing Active Directory to Rancher Prime’s role-based access controls. This sped up our implementation even more.”
Within just a few months, GWVS successfully launched the first functions of the new TOS on the new platform.
The impact of Rancher Prime
Automated deployment eases pressure on developers
For GWVS developers, Rancher Prime’s greatest value-add is how it automatically deploys new services. “In the past, we sometimes spent more than half a day manually generating application releases, deploying them to all servers, and verifying that they were running correctly,” says Flessa. “If there were errors, we had to roll everything back as quickly as possible. The effort was so significant that we often delayed releasing new versions until more features were available.”
Today, developers can effortlessly trigger deployment in GitLab by approving the code for the new release. The entire deployment process is then fully automated. Rancher Prime replaces existing service instances on all nodes with the new version. Additionally, it can automatically stop and restart a service if any issues arise, while immediately notifying developers of any errors.
“Rancher Prime saves us several hours of work on each release,” Flessa says. “We now release new features multiple times a day, as needed. At the same time, the services are always available to our users, and we don’t have to schedule maintenance windows in the evenings or on weekends.”
High security and availability
The companies within the TELIS Group handle highly sensitive personal financial data. Therefore, protecting customer data is a top priority. “We currently run all applications in our own data center and are in the process of certifying our security management to ISO/IEC 27001. Rancher Prime helps us meet all the necessary security requirements when running our container infrastructure,” says Butschan.
GWVS uses Rancher Prime to apply consistent security and user access policies across all clusters, among other tasks. The platform simplifies applying updates and security patches, keeping the entire environment up to date. Additionally, Rancher Prime can automatically verify that cluster configurations adhere to the Center for Internet Security’s (CIS) Kubernetes security recommendations.
To monitor the availability and health of all nodes and workloads, GWVS employs integrated Prometheus technology. “We can cover all Kubernetes infrastructure monitoring through the Rancher Prime platform without needing additional tools,” Flessa says. “Prometheus provides us with all the necessary information to identify performance bottlenecks early, helping us avoid potential outages.”
Flessa also appreciates that Rancher Prime centrally stores log files for all instances, making them easily searchable with Elasticsearch: “In the past, we had to examine each server’s logs for troubleshooting. Now we can locate errors and fix them much faster.”
Support for AI and increasing performance requirements
In the development of business applications for the TELIS Group, GWVS is also exploring the possibilities of AI. The company has already launched its first self-developed services based on deep learning and natural language processing. These services automatically recognize and extract relevant policy parameters (such as term, premium, sum insured, policy number and much more) when existing contracts are digitally captured.
To achieve high performance with resource-intensive AI workloads, GWVS equipped several servers with powerful NVIDIA GPUs (graphics processing units). Rancher Prime assigns AI workloads to the appropriate cluster nodes automatically, using labels to ensure AI service containers always run on cluster nodes with GPU support.
As workload performance requirements increase, GWVS can utilize Rancher Prime to flexibly provision additional system resources. “In the previous environment, it was very time-consuming for us to request more performance because there were many processes and dependencies to consider,” says Flessa. “With Rancher Prime, we as developers have to worry much less about the infrastructure issue because additional resources are available at the push of a button. For certain workloads, we will take advantage of the autoscaling capabilities of Kubernetes and Rancher Prime going forward.”
What’s next for GWVS?
Modernizing the current application landscape and developing new services will continue to be GWVS’s primary goals in the future. “We are constantly working to create added value for our clients, speed up work processes and improve the user experience for our consultants,” says Butschan. “Rancher Prime plays a crucial role in the complete digitalization of our advisory process and simplifies the integration of AI technologies for even more innovative services.”
GWVS will also continue to push the security envelope. The company is considering implementing the NeuVector Prime container security platform. “NeuVector Prime provides granular control of communication between containers and detects and remediates vulnerabilities throughout the software supply chain in real time,” Ruckdäschel concludes. “This allows us to further strengthen our security strategy and protect our customers’ sensitive data even more comprehensively.”