How At-Bay improved operations with Dapr

At-Bay is a fast-growing InsurTech startup specializing in cyber insurance. The process of creating cyber insurance policies is a complicated multi-step process, and At-Bay sought to improve operations using asynchronous message-based communication patterns.

Challenge

At-Bay faced complexity in their policy creation process while transitioning from a monolithic architecture to microservices and migrating cloud providers. Key objectives included:

• Message broker agnosticism across cloud providers
• Minimal differences between local development and cloud (Kubernetes) environments
• REST API adherence throughout the microservices stack
• Reduced maintainability costs without sacrificing agility
• Performance, fault tolerance, robustness, scalability, and traceability with minimal footprint

Solution

At-Bay selected Dapr (Distributed Application Runtime), which provides APIs simplifying microservice connectivity. Dapr deploys as a sidecar container supporting various component integrations for pub/sub, state management, secrets, and more.

For asynchronous communication, At-Bay leveraged Dapr's pub/sub component with AWS SNS/SQS. At-Bay contributed enhancements to the AWS SNS/SQS component, including disabling automatic entity management for production environments, advanced SQS features (FIFO queues, bulk size control, polling intervals), multiple retries with exponential backoffs, and custom AWS SDK integration.

Impact

Visibility and Traceability: Dapr's built-in OpenTelemetry support enabled message-level granularity, allowing At-Bay to visualize real-time system communication—solving a critical pain point in message-based systems.

Development-to-Production Parity: Developers previously needed local database setups matching cloud infrastructure. Dapr's component abstractions now allow switching between Redis (local) and other databases (cloud) without code changes.

Scalability: The component-based architecture and active open-source community support At-Bay's growing use cases for managing microservices interactions.

At-Bay now processes complex cyber insurance workflows asynchronously with enhanced operational visibility and simplified infrastructure management.