Proof of Concept to Enhance Data Management Capabilities

The Project

Proof of Concept to Enhance Data Management Capabilities

Overview

Intuit is a global financial software company that empowers prosperity by providing financial, accounting, and tax preparation software and services. Headquartered in Mountain View, California, with offices worldwide, Intuit's suite of financial software products, including QuickBooks, TurboTax, and Mint, helps millions of customers worldwide achieve financial success. As a solutions partner for Intuit, Improving helped the Data Curation team create a Proof of Concept (POC) for the graph database software Tigergraph.

The Challenge

The Tigergraph POC needed to measure the efficiency of graph queries, vertices, and edge creation and deletion to establish relationships between business entities. Challenges included installing clusters with proper and tuned configuration, ensuring high availability of the services in the cluster, and ensuring data was kept safe during the cluster restacking process. This process was complicated by the company policy of terminating each EC2 instance after one month, so each instance needed to be recreated.

The Solution

The Improving team created automation for provisioning and restacking a Tigergraph cluster with high availability and minimum downtime during restacks. The automated solution used Jenkins as the Continuous Integration system, Packer for AMI creation, Terraform for AWS resource creation/modification, and AWS SSM + Ansible for running the installation and configuration playbook. The playbook created multiple EC2 instances using Ansible’s AWS modules, tagged them, and ensured that the EBS volumes were formatted and mounted to keep all data safe during restacks. If Tigergraph software was not detected, the playbook installed and configured it in high availability mode to ensure most services were available in all nodes. Finally, Tigergraph’s dashboard and API were exposed with AWS ALBs to ensure health checks, load balancing, and high availability.

Business Benefits

Intuit had a Proof of Concept of Tigergraph that could measure the efficiency of graph queries, vertices, and edge creation and deletion for establishing relationships between business entities. The automation guaranteed the installation, configuration, and restacking of a Tigergraph cluster of six nodes in one hour with 99% availability during restacking. The successful testing, documentation, and POC, along with the positive feedback from project managers and developers, led to at least three other client teams adopting the automation, making it the de facto solution for installing and restacking Tigergraph clusters inside the company, hosted on the AWS cloud. This solution provided Intuit with a reliable and efficient way to manage their Tigergraph clusters, ultimately enhancing their data management capabilities and driving business growth.

Why Improving?

Improving's expertise in DevOps and cloud technologies, coupled with their effective communication and collaboration with Intuit, enabled them to find solutions to the challenges Intuit faced with creating a Proof of Concept for the graph database software Tigergraph. Their use of a variety of tools and technologies, including Jenkins, Packer, Terraform, AWS SSM + Ansible, and AWS ALBs, allowed them to create an automated solution for provisioning and restacking Intuit's Tigergraph cluster with high availability and minimum downtime during restacks. Improving's solution ultimately provided Intuit with a reliable and efficient way to measure the efficiency of graph queries and establish relationships between business entities, driving business growth and enhancing their data management capabilities.