ClusterControl helps cover for you insurance group scale and guide their core database through an increasingly complex world
ClusterControl enables Cover For You Insurance Group to operate a high-availability Galera cluster with full on-premises control, improving visibility, accelerating issue resolution, and reducing operational burden without sacrificing control and moving to a managed service.
Formerly Worldwide Internet Insuance Services, cover for you insurance group is an award-winning multi-brand, multi-product insurance intermediary based in Gibraltar and operating in the UK and Gibraltar. They provide travel, car hire excess, and gadget insurance through four popular brands: CoverForYou Insurance, Cedar Tree Insurance, Insure&Escape Insurance, and Outbacker Insurance. Together, these brands insure over one million people annually.
Cover For You Insurance Group’s challenge: Automating their core database while maintaining control
As Cover For You Insurance Group Limited expanded, maintaining a clear and consistent view of their Galera database cluster became increasingly important. The technical team lacked real-time visibility into cluster performance and needed better insights to guide decisions on hardware optimization and capacity planning. Outages were also difficult to detect and diagnose quickly, increasing operational risk.
ClusterControl gave us the tools we needed to effectively manage our Galera cluster without having to move to a fully-managed service.
Alan Dean, Director, Cover For You Insurance Group Limited
Before engaging Severalnines, the team considered developing in-house automation for backups and Grafana and Prometheus-based monitoring. However, they required a more comprehensive solution that was self-hosted, easy to manage, auditable, and cost-effective.
Selecting ClusterControl
After conducting market research and evaluating several options, including MariaDB Enterprise, Cover For You Insurance Group Limited selected ClusterControl. The platform provided the technical depth, and separation of concerns they needed to manage and monitor their bare metal on-prem infrastructure.
The final architecture consists of:
- 3 MySQL Galera primary nodes for core business operations
- 2 secondary nodes for backups and read-heavy analytics workloads
Implemented within hours, this deployment delivered a central control plane for monitoring, performance tuning, and backup management without requiring a fully managed service.
Results and benefits
ClusterControl enabled Cover For You Insurance Group Limited to gain real-time visibility into database performance, optimize query efficiency, and streamline backup and disaster recovery testing. The information and oversight ClusterControl provides has allowed the team to fine-tune the platform load over time and enabled them to absorb peak traffic without issue, for instance, when they saw quoting volumes triple as the current Middle East crisis unfolded.
It’s a great overall solution that fills a gap in the market between unsupported open source and fully managed enterprise systems.
Alan Dean
With better access to metrics and logs, the team can now make informed decisions about resource planning and scaling. It also reduced the management burden on their team, allowing a single person to effectively manage the cluster and freeing up time for the others.
Looking forward
Cover For You Insurance Group Limited plans to continue using open-source technologies across their infrastructure and will expand their use of ClusterControl as their database estate grows. The company sees the platform as an essential bridge between community-driven flexibility and enterprise-grade stability, helping them manage their core data repo by streamlining daily tasks, helping them resolve incidents and complete complex operations.
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Summary
Zero-compromise control
ClusterControl delivers deep visibility and operational control over a bare metal Galera cluster, eliminating the need to migrate to a fully managed service.
Faster, better decisions
Centralized monitoring, metrics, and logging enable the team to quickly diagnose issues, optimize queries, and make informed capacity planning decisions.
Lean operations at scale
Automation and a unified control plane reduce management overhead, allowing even a single operator to effectively run a production-grade HA database environment at scale.
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