Anthem Inc. is an American health insurance company founded in the 1940s, prior to 2014 known as WellPoint, Inc. It is the largest for-profit managed health care company in the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association.
Anthem is migrating hundreds of applications currently running on traditional WebSphere Application Server (tWAS) v7.0, v8.0, v8.5, and some other application servers to WebSphere Liberty, which will be running mainly on Linux on Intel, Linux on Series p, AIX, some Windows, and some Docker instances. There are plans to run Liberty on z/OS in the future. Some applications are already running in production with Liberty. The key reasons to adopt the Liberty were:
- reduction of overall cost
- reduction of cost for management of the application servers mainly through cost savings in setting up the environments
- ease of installation and upgrades
- ability to migrate from one environment to another and support for DevOps tools, like Urban Code Deploy.
- deployments are much easier and quicker.
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Anthem is taking advantage of the WebSphere Family Editionto lower licensing costs and leverage WAS Base, WAS ND, WebSphere Liberty Core licenses as needed.
Anthem was able to migrate 20 applications in a single day. Some other applications needed a few days due to changes that are necessary, like migrating from Listener Ports to Activation Specifications, etc. There are a few applications that needed much more time to rewrite code that relied on EJB 2.x and other older technologies. A few of Anthem's applications cannot take advantage of Java 8 due to their reliance on some third party libraries. In these cases, they currently use Java 7 and plan to upgrade to Java 8 in 2018.
Anthem uses WebSphere Liberty Core or Liberty Base in lower environments so that the applications can be developed and tested. In the higher environments and Production, a Collective Controller and Replica Sets are used in conjunction with IBM HTTP Server (IHS) and the WebSphere Plugin. The Collective Controller is used for Dynamic Routing, Scalability and Health Management. With Anthem's current rollout of tWAS Network Deployment, there are many of WAS Deployment Manager instances there. Anthem plans to centralize everything with a single or a small number of Collective Controllers. Most of Liberty servers will be upgraded to Liberty ND in the upper environments to take advantage of clustering, though, not all applications require this and will remain using Liberty Core or Base. The decision to use Liberty Core, Base or ND in the lower environments depends on the features the applications require, which is usually detailed in the WebSphere Migration Toolkit output.