Achievement in Just 90 Minutes

In the evening of 30 May 2022, Bowtie’s insurance core system database has been upgraded from the database engine PostgreSQL 10.x family to the PostgreSQL 13.x family, that’s jumping for three entire major database versions, it’s like going from Win8 to Win11. It has been a courageous act, but we are proud and confident that we have achieved this big goal, without taking down our entire core insurance system.

All read traffic remains unaffected. If this is not clear enough, we meant that during this huge system upgrade, features like —

making a quick quotation for our insurance products login into your Bowtie account viewing the details of your insurance applications/claims/policies — were all unaffected.

Our upgrade could be said as “zero downtime” as we only disabled the functionalities for making any new changes. Unlike industry practices, we didn’t simply shut down our entire site with a cold system maintenance notice and forbid our customers from logging in, because we know how insecure when one cannot log into a web platform.

Read further in my original article on Medium.