State Farm Engineering

State Farm® Open Source - Default CloudWatch Log Group Retention by Clete Blackwell II, Harry Manny & Rex Bennett

Benefitting the open source community through contributions and project publishing

Dec 11, 2023

State Farm® is committed to growing the open source community. Our technology team has contributed multiple projects to the community, and today we would like to tell you about our latest project! We’ve published a project which sets a log retention period on CloudWatch Logs. It’s called terraform-aws-default-log-retention, and it can help lower costs and increase compliance.

Mainframe Modernization by Drew Jaegle

Think big, start small, scale fast!

Oct 2, 2023

Got mainframe batch jobs and need to migrate them to the cloud? Looking to gain insights on how to start? Take a peek at the approach State Farm is using to migrate its P&C Claims mainframe applications.

Unlocking Test Portability by Austin Mehmet

Leveraging Containerization for Seamless End-to-End Testing in Distributed API Environments

Aug 28, 2023

As a software engineer, I’ve learned end-to-end-testing is crucial to ensure the smooth functioning of complex systems; however, it’s one of the biggest pain points in the software development lifecycle. It becomes even more challenging when dealing with multiple APIs in a distributed environment and even harder when each of these services all interact together in a sequence and require foundational data to work.

Saving on Amazon Athena costs by using Provisioned Capacity by Dan Enomoto & Bhanu Cattamanchi

For heavy Athena users, a small investment in time can yield big savings

Aug 2, 2023

Amazon Athena is an AWS serverless service allowing users to leverage standard SQL queries to analyze data stored in Amazon S3. Today, Athena has many uses across State Farm® ranging from surfacing application logs for troubleshooting to producing operational reports for contact center performance through AWS Quicksight. Here at State Farm, data enables informed decisions. In order to do that we have to generate plenty of useful data to make good decisions. As a result of this approach,…

State Farm Open Source - Terratest by Rex Bennett & Ryan Willett

Easily test your Terraform

Jun 19, 2023

In our last post, we shared how the State Farm engineering community is beginning to help others in the form of open-source projects. Today, we’re going to continue that series looking at our second open source project, Terratest Helpers. At State Farm, IaC (Infrastructure as Code) is absolutely critical to how we build applications. It provides our teams with control and consistency for the infrastructure our products run on.

State Farm® Publishes Open Source by Rex Bennett & Clete Blackwell II

Benefitting the open source community through contributions and project publishing

May 9, 2023

At State Farm®, we take pride in being a good neighbor and in helping others. We often try to find ways to give back to the communities that sustain us and, these days, that would include the online community of open source developers who create and maintain much of the code required to run the modern internet. State Farm® uses thousands of open source programs and is committed to identifying opportunities to contribute back to the community.

Resolving Spark Dependency Conflicts on AWS Glue by Nick Christopulos - Staff Technology Engineer

Process and approaches for handling conflicting dependencies

Jan 4, 2023

If you are a Spark developer, you have likely run into a dependency conflict at some point. While troubleshooting a recent issue with multiple conflicts, I was inspired to share my process along with some tips and approaches to resolving dependency conflicts during development with Apache Spark and AWS Glue.

Schema Validations by Dave Svatora - Lead Software Engineer

Schema Validations in AWS API Gateway

Dec 9, 2022

Validating inputs is a common problem that must be addressed in application software. Like many problems in information technology, there are many patterns available that provide a solution. This article will focus on one available solution for Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) deployed to AWS’s API Gateway. We will walk through setting up JSON Schema Validations, which is a good pattern for any applications leveraging API Gateways and serverless architectures. It follows…

Breaking the Limits by Chad Prentice

Leveraging Cloud Architecture at Massive Scale

Jul 15, 2022

As an insurance company, you’re bound to have a lot of documents to store and maintain. As a 100 year-old insurance company with over 87 million policies and accounts, State Farm REALLY has a lot of documents…to the tune of 12 billion documents weighing in at almost 3 petabytes of data. Those totals grow by more than 3 million documents (3 terabytes) a day. Think about an insurance claim for an auto accident. You have the photos of the damage, the estimate of the repair and the payment for…

Orchestrating Event-Driven Analytics with Ease by Evan Stalter & Tim Nickel

Jun 22, 2022

At State Farm our mission is to help more customers in more ways. To achieve that goal, a vast network of components across multiple platforms (PaaS, AWS, Salesforce, and Legacy to name a few) must flawlessly operate behind the scenes to help our agents and call center associates help new and existing customers. Much of this architecture today relies on synchronous point-to-point calls across these platforms, bringing potential challenges such as an outage that could negatively impact our daily…