Accelerating innovation using the AWS EBA program with PIB Group

Since its founding in 2015, PIB has acquired over 100 insurance businesses across Europe. The company wanted to consolidate and modernize the businesses’ applications and infrastructure by using a cloud-first model to monitor performance, improve compatibility, and apply best practices across the group. “We’re constantly acquiring new solutions and technologies,” says Elliott Fraser, lead cloud architect and DevSecOps manager at PIB. “We wanted to streamline those by migrating them to AWS.”

One of these businesses had concerns about cloud migration. Satisfied with its hosting provider’s VMware, the newly acquired company was hesitant to modernize its development and test environments. But its on-premises setup relied on private data centers with limited observability, significant operation and maintenance costs, and restricted disaster-recovery capabilities. And upgrading the hardware would have required a substantial investment. “There were issues with capacity planning,” says Luke Copeman, head of cloud operations at PIB. “But the teams didn’t have a way to see the risks that they were holding at the time.”

To help the new team gain confidence in cloud technology, the AWS team organized an AWS EBA event. This would accelerate the migration progress while upskilling developers and demonstrating the benefits of the cloud during the transition.

By inviting the newly acquired company’s business and development teams to this 3-day immersive event, PIB alleviated their concerns about the migration. “It showed them the power of AWS and what we could do in comparison with their on-premises hosting provider,” says Copeman. The PIB team worked with the AWS team to create an outline for a migration strategy that served as the blueprint for migrating other business solutions.

Building on its learnings from the migration AWS EBA, PIB took part in an observability AWS EBA to establish an enterprise-level monitoring strategy and reduce the mean time to detect and mean time to respond. “Typical infrastructure monitoring is reactive,” says Copeman. “Instead, we wanted to gain deeper insight into our applications by using AWS observability tooling to make intelligent decisions to improve performance and minimize downtime.” During the workshop, AWS experts helped identify issues about unsupported .NET versions and the logging infrastructure. The AWS team provided recommendations for improving infrastructure, monitoring, and database performance—including the use of Amazon CloudWatch to observe and monitor resources and applications. These recommendations would provide immediate benefits while helping PIB prepare for future upgrades.

The observability AWS EBA served as a catalyst for broader discussions about modernizing PIB’s technology stack. And 3 months later, PIB participated in a third AWS EBA: a modernization (ModAx) program. For this event, the two teams split into several ones to address different aspects of modernization, including API containerization and reference architecture. The API containerization team focused on optimization by containerizing an application that was hosted in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure and resizable compute capacity. PIB implemented Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to run production-grade workloads in a highly reliable, scalable, and secure environment.

Meanwhile, the reference architecture team created a repeatable process for microservices. PIB designed a reusable infrastructure-as-code template and used the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) to design and share reusable components. These would help in provisioning containerized applications and implementing security controls. The company also adopted AWS CodePipeline to automate continuous delivery pipelines, AWS CodeDeploy to automate code deployment, and AWS CodeBuild to build and test code with automated scaling.

Using AWS services and participating in face‑to‑face workshops to modernize its infrastructure, PIB has increased developer productivity and application reliability. The collaboration between business and technology teams accelerated decision-making and solution design by combining diverse expertise, aligning priorities, and driving rapid agreement on actionable plans.

Continuing its optimization journey, PIB is planning a fourth AWS EBA in the coming months, this time for security. “We’re grateful for the AWS team’s continued support,” says Copeman. “The impact of the past AWS EBA programs has been significant, and we’re keen to continue using this mechanism and expand it to other parts of the business.”