Modernising LeakBot’s Infrastructure To Drive Innovation

Leaks are one of the leading causes of insurance claims (c.£14bn / year paid out in the UK and US) and can cause costly damage to the home. Using patented technology, LeakBot’s water damage prevention system brings peace of mind to homeowners and claims cost reduction for insurers.

The Business

Ondo Insurtech Plc are an InsureTech company who partner with top insurers across the UK, US and the Nordics, supplying their innovative product LeakBot to homeowner end-users across these regions. LeakBot is an internet of things (IoT) smart water leak detector that monitors homes 24/7, using clever technology to alert users to leaks in their home and provides associated plumbing experts to find the leak and provide repair solutions before they become bigger problems. 

Leaks are one of the leading causes of insurance claims (c.£14bn / year paid out in the UK and US) and can cause costly damage to the home. Using patented technology, LeakBot’s water damage prevention system brings peace of mind to homeowners and claims cost reduction for insurers.

The Challenge

As a technology driven IoT company, it’s vital for LeakBot to run on an infrastructure that supports its innovative solutions. Due to technical debt inherited as part of the company’s early start-up phase, the infrastructure running the back end of the LeakBot platform was proving increasingly difficult to support. As a result, LeakBot began to experience several issues that could no longer be resolved by the CTS support team. 

This meant they needed assistance to fully modernise LeakBot’s infrastructure not only to resolve their current blockers, but to put them in a good place to scale their business. To do this, CTS were asked to  support a full platform re-architecture. 

The objectives of the project were to: 

• Unblock what had become a time consuming manual code deployment process with a new, container-based pipeline 
• Implement a fully managed, industry-standard Kubernetes environment (GKE Autopilot) to support future business growth.
• Enable advanced security and observability with Anthos Service Mesh
• Reduce operational overheads related to running and managing VMs
• Enable future support of the platform
• Refresh IaC repositories to current CTS standards

The Solution

The industry standard method of using microservices today is having them run in containers. Most services are tailored to do this including Matlab, which is used within LeakBot’s core platform. 

A major blocker came up when launching the Matlab service using containers.  A lot of time was spent working on the issues around this, and in the end we decided to run Matlab using traditional VMs so the team could carry on working on the remainder of the project. The containerisation tasks would be reviewed at the end of the project as part of CTS’ continuous delivery approach.

The Results

LeakBot is now running in an industry standard container environment that’s fully supportable, highly available, scalable and secure, and runs at a significantly lower operational cost than the previous platform. They have the ability to change their own configuration without having to wait for CTS to handle the tickets as well as a proper release process (reducing deployment time by around 70%) with improved monitoring and better logging. While Leakbot did the project predominantly because of growing technical debt i.e. the old configuration was unsupportable, the cost savings are a bonus. Early signs suggest around 30% savings on production environment costs despite an increased database size. As the underlying applications are optimised, further cost savings may become apparent. 

If, like LeakBot you’re looking to modernise your infrastructure, get in touch with our team to find out how we can help.