The e-commerce platform for American Heritage Life, from the mainframe out to the public web: a SQL Server tier behind the corporate firewall, a tunnel across to a colocation facility, a second firewall, and a load-balanced web cluster on Foundry ServerIron in front of it.
Production, backup production, QA and development were held as genuinely separate environments, rather than one estate with a naming convention.
The deliverable was the boundary
This was 2001, when a mainframe insurance business selling to retail customers over the public internet was still a novel proposition rather than an assumption.
The interesting work was never the website. It was the boundary — what may cross inward, on which port to which host, and how data moves from a mainframe into a database the internet can reach without the internet being able to reach the mainframe. Every element in the path exists to answer some version of that question, and the two-firewall arrangement with the colocation tunnel between them is the answer written in equipment.
Revision 243
The documentation ran to revision 243. On an ordinary project that number would suggest churn.
Here it is the opposite. On an estate where the security boundary is the product, the document is not a record of the design so much as part of it: every rule, host and port that was ever permitted, and when, and why. A boundary you cannot describe precisely is a boundary you cannot audit, and one nobody has written down for a while is not a boundary at all — it is a set of accumulated exceptions that used to be one.
Outcome
A retail channel onto a mainframe business, built so that the internet could reach the data without being able to reach the mainframe.