MetLife Asia, a global provider of insurance, annuities and employee benefit programs has enhanced the efficiency and quality of their software development cycle with DevOps integration.
The team extended its focus beyond the core platform, Microsoft Azure, by adopting Azure DevOps, a tool that streamlines application building, testing, and deployment.
MetLife Asia's CIO, Siew Choo Soh, stated that since launching the new platform, the time required for automated tests and builds has been reduced from just under eight hours to less than an hour in many instances.
She added that the regularly scheduled scans have improved code quality and addressed vulnerabilities promptly.
"These scans also save approximately 15 minutes per build per developer and help detect errors earlier," she added.
MetLife serves individual and institutional insurance customers across several countries including Australia, China, India, Japan, Malaysia and Vietnam.
The teams mainly developed Java and ReactJS mobile applications focussing on policy registration, profile updates, policy inquiries, and claim submissions. A few other apps supported value-added services such as scheduling a doctor’s appointment and even making video calls directly with a doctor.
Soh said they were relying on manual testing processes, and uploading each build could take up to eight hours to complete. Error detection often occurred only after deployment, making this inefficiency a major drawback impacting both agility and precision, she added.
Transforming DevOps
MetLife developers in Asia aimed to adopt regional industry practices for their development security operations (DevSecOps).
Before Azure, MetLife struggled to scale applications effectively due to their growing size and number. To address these challenges, they aimed to unify all teams around a standard that would boost developer productivity and improve the security of application deployments.
They expanded on Azure DevOps to standardise build pipelines for continuous integration and deployments (CI/CD).
Azure Boards gave teams the flexibility to track effectively and improve project management. Azure Repos has provided scalable Git repositories for managing source code, while Azure Pipelines automated the build and deployment processes. Pipelines also handled deployment to the target environment.
Teams across the region collaborated using a test-and-learn approach aiming to automate and integrate quality models into the pipelines and ensure a seamless implementation of the desired standards.
Soh said the new process was fully implemented in under six months, offering teams end-to-end traceability.
The company is now better equipped to protect customer information, she added.
MetLife has gained access to real-time status updates and performance trends for releases, projects, and sprints, allowing for faster decision-making. Soh hopes to continually grow and develop the company's infrastructure and processes.
