365 Assistance scale and deliver services faster with AC3

The company

“365 Assistance you would normally think was just a roadside assistance company. And at its core, it was, but I came into the business to transform 365 into a technology company. Whether travel insurance, home insurance, active roadside assistance, planning for electric vehicles and the changing environment.” Said Alan.

Headquartered in Sydney with over 200 staff and a national network of 3500+ across New Zealand and the UK, the team at 365 Assistance are driven by bringing people, brands and customers together in igniting a spirit of ‘working in communities, for communities.

The challenge

“365 as a company has been looking to solve a lot of different challenges, and one of the biggest ones is how do we scale as a business when we go international.”

As well as scaling as a business, 365 Assistance faced with the gruelling task of deploying a new version of an application, which required several manual steps before a deployment could start. To make changes in their prod, staging, test and dev environments, changes had to be made to four separate templates, plus four additional AWS Lambda functions also needed to be updated as a parameter and deployment handler.

Additional potential issues to overcome included the susceptibility of a high failure of deployments due to poor technical debt, the potential of lengthy DR recovery time in the case of an emergency deployment, secret environment variables were showing in the AWS CloudFormation Template and providing the 365 developers with an easy way to be able to test their code in the cloud.

The solution

“We chose AC3 as our technology partner by going through an RFP process and finding out that they were the clear choice over everybody else. They were very personable and their service towards us was outstanding.”

“We employee AC3 as our managed services provider to help us grow and grow rapidly as a business and it helps us scale very quickly for our customers.”

AC3 worked closely with the 365 Assistance team to manage their AWS cloud infrastructure to ensure scalability, availability, reliability and security.

365 Assist and AC3 also converted the AWS CloudFormation Templates to a Python AWS CDK Stack, which acts as a base template for their prod, staging, test and dev environments, resulting in no need for duplicate code.

To assist the 365 Assistance developers to deploy and test specific application builds to each environment, AC3 and 365 worked together to move all moving parts into a singular CI/CD platform. We created an AWS Route 53 record and AWS Application Load Balancer rule to point to a developer’s ECS Target Group. Controls were also added to ensure that the application has been deployed in the environment before it with no errors.

For smoother deployment and application stability, Git webhooks were implemented, secret Environment Variables were moved to ensure ECS Fargate best practice, the NAT instance was replaced with NAT Gateways and additional features were applied to ensure the application is more stable.

The results

“The results for 365 Assistance have been fantastic. We're able to deliver to our customers quicker and we're able to service the end customer and the end customer is what we focus on.” Said Alan.

With automated checks, 365 Assistance can deploy with the knowledge of them no longer failing, whilst allowing for quick changes when required. The infrastructure has also been built to be resilient against multiple availability zone outages, providing higher availability.

“When they come to us with alternative solutions and better solutions, that is what we want to pay for. We want to pay for a partner that can come to us and say, ‘hey, look, we like your idea, but here's a better one and a cheaper one’, and that's what AC3 do” concluded Alan.