Compara Online: Democratizing Access to Insurance and Financial Services Information
About COMPARA ONLINE
Compara Online, as its name suggests, is an online financial service comparison tool - mainly insurance - whose purpose is to democratize access to and use of information by deploying the highest number of products from different insurance companies in the market so users can freely choose the option that best fits their needs.
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Contact usCompara Online is an online financial service comparison tool that deploys the highest number of products from different insurance companies so users can freely choose the best option.
Google Cloud results
- Regional expansion strategy through IT infrastructure based on microservices and high scalability.
- On a Cyber Monday, Compara Online can easily increase its regular traffic to 170%.
- They have reduced their costs by 30% using Kubernetes instead of deploying EC2 instances with EB.
They can deploy in just 3 minutes. Before, they needed from 30 minutes to 1 day of work.
Compara Online, as its name suggests, is an online financial service comparison tool - mainly insurance - whose purpose is to democratize access to and use of information by deploying the highest number of products from different insurance companies in the market so users can freely choose the option that best fits their needs.
Compara Online stands out from its competitors because it is impartial. One of its main goals is that users are satisfied with their choice, no matter what it is. Thus, the company provides abundant information on its platform which can be checked with asynchronous communication through different channels and with customer service to advise users about their decision.
"We could build the entire environment for microservices and deployments in a very short time and migrate our architecture to work on these systems in a couple of weeks."
—Ezequiel Rabinovich, Back-End Manager and Technical Leader at Compara Online.Currently, the company employs 300 professionals and is headquartered in Chile, while it carries out business in Chile, Brazil and Colombia. Through its regional expansion strategy that relies on an IT infrastructure based on microservices and high scalability, in September 2018, ComparaOnline acquired the Colombian company Compara Mejor , with its Colombian team going from 5 to 40 people.
Innovating in the Complex World of Insurance and Financial Services
As with most startups, initially, Compara Online was facing the technological challenge of having servers that could not adapt to required support variations, so they had to anticipate that the servers could cover for the highest traffic peaks without making a huge upfront investment in physical infrastructure as well as maintenance and team supervision staff.
The monolithic and unstable technology the company had at the outset hindered workflow, with small problems becoming more complex and affecting speed, development and the ability to make continuous deployments. Compara Online needed a microservice architecture that allowed them to handle many applications with a small DevOps team in order to launch at least three microservices a month.
In 2017, the team at Compara Online took part in the Google Launchpad program; it was there where they first became familiar with Google Cloud tools and gained insight into the benefits these tools could offer: scalability according to their needs, paying only for what they use and through one of the base tools the company already used, Kubernetes. That is how they decided, that same year, to start moving their cloud services to the Google Cloud.
The First Steps on Google Cloud
Setting up and building the foundations of the Compara Online architecture so it could use Google Cloud took only a couple of weeks, as they decided to create a tunnel between their previous cloud provider and Google Cloud to start implementing new projects in the new platform.
"We could build the entire environment for microservices and deployments in a very short period of time and migrate our architecture to work on these systems in a couple of weeks." -- Ezequiel Rabinovich, Back-End Manager and Technical Leader at Compara Online.
"Using the cloud has benefited us greatly as we have a lot of freedom to handle resources as needed without making large upfront investments."
—Ezequiel Rabinovich, Back-End Manager and Technical Leader at Compara Online.Compara Online features a Kubernetes Docker-based microservice architecture. The tools they use include: Google Kubernetes Engine, Google Compute Engine, Google Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL and BigQuery for the data science team. "Instead of using orchestration systems we decided to go with a choreographic system, using Apache Kafka to handle communication, which allows us to manage everything in an asynchronous fashion and with a high tolerance to failures, " explains Ezequiel Rabinovich, Back-End Manager and Technical Leader at Compara Online.
"Instead of using orchestration systems we decided to go with a choreographic system, using Apache Kafka to handle communication, which allows us to manage everything in an asynchronous fashion and with a high tolerance to failures."
—Ezequiel Rabinovich, Back-End Manager and Technical Leader at Compara Online.Also, using Google Kubernetes Engine, Compara Online can quickly and easily scale to handle traffic increases during events like Black Fridays/Cyber Mondays held in different countries, or to launch their products in more countries.
The Benefits of the Google Cloud Architecture for Instant Comparisons
Google Cloud has allowed the Compara Online team to remain relatively small, as having people fully dedicated to handle their service infrastructure is not necessary and can be done by keeping a Kubernetes environment running and allowing developers to launch a new application in 3 minutes - as against the 30 minutes to 1 day of work that job previously required - thanks to ease of configuration, enabling accelerated growth without many DevOps. With the previous cloud server, DevOps at Compara Online could only maintain 7 services per person, while Google Cloud allows them to maintain over 30.
"Without having to scale the development or devops team, we started handling over 30 microservices without creating any problem in the operation, using Kubernetes to define our infrastructure in setup files and have better monitoring tools."
—Ezequiel Rabinovich, Back-End Manager and Technical Leader at Compara Online.Developers' productivity has increased, mainly because of console tools which help quickly retrieve the information they need on service functioning. Plus, with Kubernetes, they do not need to worry about where their application will run but only about the resources they require. On the other hand, the use of Kubernetes has reduced their costs by up to 30% as against deploying EC2 instances with EB.
"All developments at Compara Online are oriented to the microservice architecture because we use Kubernetes in the background, which allows us to launch several new microservices each year without increasing management and maintenance costs that much."
—Ezequiel Rabinovich, Back-End Manager and Technical Leader at Compara Online.In addition, Compara Online points out that, besides the technological department, the company's commercial department has also benefited from platform implementation, as its elasticity and scalability have allowed them to engage in online sale events that have increased their website's regular traffic by 70% for a week, while after the event, the website returns to its usual traffic. Temporarily increasing their infrastructure for these events only took them a couple of days.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About COMPARA ONLINE
Compara Online, as its name suggests, is an online financial service comparison tool - mainly insurance - whose purpose is to democratize access to and use of information by deploying the highest number of products from different insurance companies in the market so users can freely choose the option that best fits their needs.