AWS

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.

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,…

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…

AWS Multi-Account Management using Cloud Custodian and Serverless Compute by Ryan Ash

A simple and scalable approach to using Cloud Custodian for AWS governance, security and cost controls.

Oct 28, 2021

Whether administering three or 300 AWS accounts, it is essential to implement consistent security and governance policies. Enabling users to leverage all the AWS services while remaining within the guardrails defined by your company is the goal. Polices should be relatively easy to create and implement. Having a stable deployment and runtime for these policies allows administrators to focus their valuable time elsewhere. Cloud Custodian policies provide flexibility to write governance rules in…

DynamoDB Ingestion to an Enterprise Data Lake by Clete Blackwell II

A journey in discovering architectural patterns

Jun 14, 2021

Companies manage a lot of data – often having application data in many different data stores and in a variety of formats (e.g., File storage, DB2, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MSSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, and more). That data can also live on many different physical data centers ranging from on-premises to vendor data centers to public cloud data centers. Each data store is created for a specific purpose, such as customer contact information, conversation logs, policy data, or purchase history.

Comparison of AWS Services for Event Driven Architecture by Jeff Himmell

Feb 8, 2021

At State Farm® we’re about helping people. Helping people manage the risks of everyday life and recover from the unexpected is at the core of what we do. As it applies to technology, the Event Driven Architecture (EDA) pattern is especially useful for orchestrating multiple services in unforeseen situations. However, deciding on the best AWS product to use as the event bus can be daunting. This article will cover common considerations (such as scalability), as well as those that can make a bad…

Using Terraform for S3 Storage with MIME Type Association by Dillon Henn

Confidently deploy your content to S3 using Terraform - here's how we did it.

Jan 5, 2021

Today, many product teams may utilize the Amazon Simple Storage Service to store Single Page Application (SPA) resources. Oftentimes they do this by packaging infrastructure code with the application code. However, this tends to add complexity to the pipeline because the content for S3 must be uploaded and synched in a separate step.