Specializing in the creation of SaaS and IaaS solutions for the world of insurance, insurers, brokers, and comparators, Profideo currently manages more than a hundred applications hosted on its own infrastructures. Through these applications, Profideo mainly provides business intelligence solutions based on analysis of insurance contracts, whether legal, commercial, or competitive, which also involves managing large amounts of data. The company initially chose to adopt a cloud-native approach with a Docker and Kubernetes-based infrastructure, as well as CI/CD pipelines to ensure optimal scalability and performance for its customers. Over time, however, hosting and managing this infrastructure with multiple providers has become a challenge in terms of manageability, security, and cost.
| Implementation of a unified, high-performance Docker and Kubernetes infrastructure | Optimization of the costs associated with hosting the infrastructure | Improved infrastructure security through a granular and unified approach |
By making the choice to streamline our Kubernetes infrastructure and VMs on Nutanix and OVHcloud, we aim for better security and quality of service as well as cost optimization.
To operate its applications, Profideo relied on four distinct infrastructures. The company had Microsoft and VMware VMs for its internal needs hosted at its headquarters in Saint-Ouen and at Scaleway; test and pre-production environments in managed services at BSO for the cloud-native part; and several clusters at Amazon Web Services for production. For confidentiality reasons, each of its customers has its own test, pre-production, and production environments. "It was too much. Beyond the obvious cost and management issues, we had problems with application performance and security monitoring between the various environments," said Frédéric Boisseau, CIO at Profideo. When he took over as head of the IT department, he began a three-month audit to understand how to improve the situation. "We had to respond to a double challenge. First, we had to unify hosting to improve management, performance, and financial efficiency, and second, we had to put back quality at the heart of our development strategy," he added.
Already familiar with Nutanix from his previous roles, Frédéric Boisseau decided to turn to Nutanix Cloud Platform for both VMs and for Kubernetes environments thanks to the Nutanix Kubernetes Engine distribution. Profideo also chose to host its entire infrastructure on OVHcloud. "Our business is not to manage an infrastructure, and OVHcloud brings us solid guarantees in terms of governance and data hosting. The combination of Nutanix and OVHcloud allows us to focus on what matters most to us: namely development, deployment of new services, and quality and performance management without having to worry about issues related to infrastructure and hosting," explained Frédéric Boisseau. To support its business needs, Profideo is in the process of deploying two Kubernetes clusters of 30TB, each spread over two separate datacenters connected and redundant by a 50Gb/s link for resilience. "Storage was not our priority; instead, we focused on large CPU and memory capacities to ensure optimal performance for our clusters," said the CIO.
In terms of solutions, Profideo relies on Nutanix Cloud Platform, Nutanix Kubernetes Engine and AHV (Nutanix hypervisor) for hosting Kubernetes and VMs, the file storage solution Nutanix Files and Nutanix Flow for micro-segmentation, and Nutanix Prism to manage it all. On the security side, Profideo also deployed CloudFlare to provide unified security across its cloud-native infrastructure. "Previously, security was managed on an ad hoc basis, with firewall-level IP filtering in some cases and proxies in others. This was not satisfactory, and so it became critical to adopt a unified management system for the entire infrastructure," said Frédéric Boisseau.
By streamlining hosting on a single platform and on a single host, Profideo aims at lowering the related costs. "We will keep the same budget, but we will be able to do many more things. In addition, we have a much more precise vision of the way we consume the resources, and this will allow us to be much more efficient in the use of the infrastructure, but also in managing our performance and the quality of our services," said Frédéric Boisseau. Additionally, the company can easily failover to AWS in the event of activity peaks.
From a security point of view, the choice of CloudFlare and Nutanix Flow allows Profideo to adopt a unified and centralized approach to managing its entire infrastructure, both on the VM and container sides. "The choice of OVHcloud is also not insignificant in this matter. Our customers entrust us with sensitive data, and being able to rely on a French hosting company that guarantees data storage in France and is SecNum Cloud-certified gives us a genuine competitive edge," explained the CIO.
"We are currently in the final stages of deploying the first cluster that will serve as a test for us to failover the entire infrastructure. We will need to do some replatforming to adapt our Kubernetes clusters to Nutanix Kubernetes Engine, but it will be minor," said the CIO. The aim is to make this new infrastructure available to developers, who are very receptive to the project. They will be able to manage the resources they need without increasing the bill.
A word from the partner: Skill Partner
The Profideo project encompasses cutting-edge technologies in terms of cloud-native infrastructure and reflects both our ability and the ability of Nutanix to address these issues in a relevant way. Not only did we act as consultants and integrators on this project, but also as outsourcers of monitoring services and automatic failover of the BCP through Prism.