Accelerating agility for First American: Modernizing document management with DevOps and AWS

First American Financial Corporation is a leading provider of title insurance and settlement services, serving a wide range of customers involved in residential and commercial property transactions. Operating within the financial services and real estate industries, the company facilitates the secure transfer of property ownership by providing title insurance to protect buyers and lenders against potential claims or disputes. Beyond its core title business, First American offers a diverse suite of related services, including title plant management, property data and analytics, valuation products and services, home warranty offerings, and trust and wealth management solutions, positioning itself as a comprehensive partner for various stakeholders in the real estate ecosystem.

The Challenge

First American faced significant operational challenges stemming from their legacy Document Management System (DocRepo v1) including performance issues, prohibitively expensive one-off feature changes, and a cumbersome change management process. The reliance on obsolete technologies further exacerbated these issues, resulting in increased maintenance costs, limited scalability, and a reduced capacity to leverage modern digital capabilities. The lack of a unified platform also created inefficiencies in information retrieval and sharing, impacting overall productivity and critical business processes within the real estate transaction lifecycle.

If these challenges were not addressed, First American would have continued to incur escalating costs associated with maintaining multiple, outdated systems. The inability to consolidate data and workflows would have perpetuated operational inefficiencies, hindering the organization's agility and responsiveness to market changes. Furthermore, the limitations of the existing technology would have posed a growing risk to data security and compliance. The lack of a modern, scalable infrastructure could have also impeded the company's ability to adopt new technologies and innovate its service offerings.

The Solution

As part of the delivery of the new Document Management System, we embarked on a phased digital transformation journey. The initial approach focused on modernizing the deployment pipeline using Infrastructure as Code (Terraform) and containerization (ECS), leading to faster and more efficient deployments. Recognizing the limitations and security concerns of the initial setup, we guided First American towards a more robust and scalable cloud-native architecture on AWS. This involved a significant shift to Kubernetes (EKS) for orchestrating microservices, establishing a multi-region disaster recovery strategy, and implementing comprehensive security and observability measures. Our iterative approach allowed for continuous improvement and adaptation to First American's evolving needs and security requirements, ultimately leading to a unified, resilient, and cost-effective document management system.

AA cornerstone of the solution was the strategic utilization of several primary AWS services, delivered through Infrastructure as Code (primarily Terraform and Helm for Kubernetes resources) and managed via GitHub pipelines. Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) served as the central compute platform, providing a managed Kubernetes service to run and scale the application's containerized microservices across multiple Availability Zones for high availability. Amazon Aurora (PostgreSQL) Global Database was chosen for the primary data store, offering cross-region read and write capabilities crucial for disaster recovery with minimal data loss and downtime. Amazon OpenSearch Service provided scalable search functionality, with cross-cluster replication implemented to ensure search index availability and consistency across regions in the event of a failure. Amazon ElastiCache (Redis) was deployed in a multi-region configuration to provide a fast and highly available caching layer, improving application performance and reducing database load.

These core compute and data services were complemented by other critical AWS components to create a comprehensive system architecture. Amazon S3 provided scalable object storage for various data needs. Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) offered a shared, scalable file system with cross-region replication for persistent data storage and availability. For messaging and inter-service communication, Amazon SNS and Amazon SQS were utilized. Networking was managed through Amazon VPC to create isolated virtual networks, Route 53 for DNS management (though client-managed), and CloudFront for content delivery. Security was a paramount concern, addressed through services like AWS Secrets Manager for secure credential management, IAM for access control, AWS WAF for web application protection, and the integration of automated security tools like Veracode (SAST) and Prisma.

The successful integration of these AWS services was facilitated by robust DevOps practices, including CI/CD pipelines managed with GitHub Actions and Argo CD, and comprehensive observability using Elastic APM and AWS CloudWatch. Infrastructure governance was enforced through tools like AWS Control Tower and AWS Config. The entire infrastructure was provisioned and managed as code, ensuring consistency, repeatability, and auditability across different environments (test, dev, staging, production). The multi-account strategy further enhanced security and isolation.

The combination of these AWS services, delivered and managed through a mature DevOps framework, resulted in a highly resilient, scalable, and performant document management system for First American. The multi-region architecture ensured business continuity and data durability, while the cloud-native services provided cost efficiency and operational agility. The CI/CD pipelines enabled rapid and reliable software delivery, and the comprehensive observability tools provided the necessary insights for proactive monitoring and troubleshooting. Ultimately, our expertise in leveraging AWS and implementing modern DevOps practices effectively solved First American's challenges, allowing them to retire their legacy DMS, while also delivering a future-proof platform capable of supporting their evolving business needs.

The Results

This project successfully executed a critical digital transformation, replacing an aging monolithic system that was over 15 years old with a modern, scalable, and resilient cloud-native solution hosted on AWS. The legacy system's limitations severely hampered business agility, restricting system updates to only three times per year. The new platform immediately increased this cadence to monthly deployments, with the built-in capability to accelerate further as business demands evolve, significantly boosting the organization's responsiveness to change.

Operationally, the move away from the cumbersome monolithic structure to a container-based microservice architecture yielded substantial benefits. Implementing and maintaining one-off feature changes, previously a slow and expensive undertaking on the old system, was significantly less complex and more cost-effective under the new solution. Furthermore, the inherent stability and resilience of the new cloud-based infrastructure addressed the performance issues that plagued the legacy system, leading to a vastly improved and more reliable experience for end-users.

Beyond the core technological improvements, the transformation directly tackled key business risks and user experience deficits. It addressed critical document security concerns by enabling better identification and management of documents and establishing clearer document ownership protocols.