Aegon - Integratie Consultant ESB

Aegon Integratie Laag - AIL

Project Overview

Aegon Integratie Laag, abbreviated AIL, was the enterprise service bus of Aegon. Started to expose services, functions and information in a generic way for the whole organisation according to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). A Canonical Data Model (CDM) was used to hide the complexity of different contract administrations and to be able to talk across the entire organisation in one way about common concepts such as customer, service and product.

The architecture consisted of Mediation Services, Business Services and Process Services.

• Mediation Services translated the application specific functions and interfaces to generic reusable functions in terms of data model and technology.
• Business Services delivered generic services with the mediation services as building blocks.
• Process Services could provide complex services as workflows optionally with manual process steps.

In this role I helped many projects throughout the organisation with services to enable their capabilities via the ESB platform. We guided projects with requirements analysis, design of new services and their realisation and operations.

My Aegon

Around 2010 Aegon started an initiative to set up direct channels for customers itself, with a MijnAegon web portal and eventually a MijnAegon Mobile App. These apps were directly fed by the services of the AIL, there was only a reverse proxy in between that functioned as a CIAM broker to handle the authentication for the services. Services used an IBM proprietary LTPA token to identify the user and handled fine grained authorisation by determining the role and rights of the user on the information to be requested.

I was actively involved in the various solutions and functions that provided this mechanism. We could dynamically determine roles of users on contracts and in that way determine whether they were allowed to view or mutate the information with the ESB functions. Roles could be for example policy holder, insured, participant, contract holder, selling or managing adviser, mandated person, beneficiary, service provider, etc.

The AIL was one of the pillars on which the MijnAegon environment was built.

Circuit breaker pattern

The AIL connected with many different backends and types of technology. It regularly happened that backend systems did not answer for all kinds of reasons. Planned or unplanned maintenance or other problems in the chains. Responses to requests from online environments did not arrive and the technical platform was not able to handle the accumulating numbers of unprocessed messages. As a result the entire ESB environment too often became unstable and was no longer able to handle any request.

I designed a circuit breaker pattern that ensured that systems that no longer responded were automatically closed off and requests were no longer sent to those systems. In that way the problem was limited to the individual backend system and the rest of the ESB service was not affected.

This resulted in a significant improvement in the overall availability of the Service Bus.

Platform upgrade

The upgrade of the IBM WPS platform was not an in-place update of the installation. It was a matter of deploying a new version and then compiling all services one by one for the new version and deploying them. Previous version upgrades that had been executed as big bang updates seemed very inconvenient to me and in my view involved a lot of hassle for the consumers of the services.

For the last version upgrade of the platform I led a different approach in which the new environment was built alongside the old environment. We could migrate consumers of services ourselves via load balancer configurations from the old platform to the new one. Apart from regression tests at our request the consumers of the services experienced no impact from this approach.

Impact

• Helped many projects with information provisioning or making new functions available.
• Made MijnAegon possible in part through new services and a fine-grained authorisation approach.
• Solved one of the most important reasons for instability of the entire ESB.
• Drafted alternative platform upgrade strategy allowing execution without impact for consumers.

Technology Stack

IBM Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), IBM Websphere Process Server (WPS), Webseal, LTPA, Java, BPMN, F5 Load Balancer