AWS Foundation and Migration Proof of Concept

The Challenge

Healthcare organisations depend on our customer’s application for personalised care management. A highly customisable product, the app experiences peak utilisation during periods of elevated private healthcare enrolment.

In its original on-premise environment, our customer had to provision the number of servers required to cover these times of increased load. While this works, this means that much of that server capacity sits idle for much of the year, draining management time and money.

Our customer wanted to change this for their customers. To get started, they decided to embark on a cloud migration proof of concept for their app that focused on scalability, automation, and establishment of a solid cloud foundation. Our customer was introduced to TEKsystems Global Services (TGS), and the lift-and-shift of their application began.

Why Amazon Web Services

The organisation’s clients were increasingly inquiring about cloud offerings. Because their parent company had already been using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to implement new microservices for their healthcare systems, they knew that AWS could give them the on-demand scaling they needed, as well as high availability and well-isolated customer environments.

They felt inspired to create a cloud environment that could be used for a proof-of-concept migration of the current architecture, with an eye toward an eventual rearchitecture that would use microservices to support large and small customers alike. Our customer selected AWS because of its ability to auto scale with the computing needs of customers and due to the cost efficiency of many of their cloud services.

Additionally, AWS offers extensive support for high availability and industry-specific compliance standards, both must-haves for our customer’s team. Through collaboration with TGS, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, they were able to build a platform in AWS for their customers to leverage in the future, and deliver a proof-of-concept migration of their critical application.

The Benefits

Our collaboration with the customer started from the ground up: creating a new account and organisation structure that would promote ease of management and thorough isolation of customer workloads.

After designing the account structure, AWS Control Tower was leveraged to jump-start the implementation. With one click of a button, AWS Control Tower provides a single sign-on solution (AWS SSO), separate permission sets for various users (admins, power users, finance team members and the like), security guardrails, automated account provisioning, and centralised security logging and billing.

This meant that valuable time could be spent on finessing security guardrails instead of tedious, manual account creation, and configuration.

With the account structure in place, a network architecture was next on the list. By using AWS Transit Gateway, a variety of other network components and Route 53, we were able to design a network that allowed for seamless connectivity and DNS resolution between the on-premise and AWS environment. By coupling that with components to support encryption at rest and in transit (using AWS Key Management Service and AWS Certificate Manager), the customer had a solid foundation to build on.

The focus then turned to their core application, a single-tenant, traditional Windows application that utilises a variety of Virtual Machines, file shares, and SQL Server databases. Aside from the quality and features the app offers, it also provides a high degree of customisation to meet customers’ needs. This meant that the customer needed a simple, repeatable way to stand up multiple app environments for each customer, in a way that would eventually allow for easy scaling and customisation.

This kind of use case is tailor-made for a robust infrastructure-as-code solution, and using Terraform to create the Amazon EC2 instances, Amazon FSx file systems, and assorted databases and load balancers gave the customer the repeatability they were after.

Additionally, the infrastructure makes use of AWS Database Migration Service for easy database replication, as well as Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling groups. Right now, those auto scaling groups are used to ensure high availability of various components; in the future, as app components are refactored to support horizontal scaling, they’ll be used to dynamically scale the app in response to load.

“By migrating our applications to AWS, we’ll be able to provide high availability and scalability while reducing costs,” said the company’s Director of Software Development. “We’ll also be able to optimise and automate our deployment strategy into the cloud, which will significantly reduce our implementation time for new customers.”

Ultimately, this will deliver the desired resiliency and cost-effectiveness for our customer’s app, along with all the other pieces that are “table stakes” in the healthcare context: customer isolation, security, and regulatory compliance. Plus, by partnering with TGS, the team’s knowledge of and ability with AWS grew by leaps and bounds over the course of the project.

The end result? Our customer is now well-positioned to leverage their new expertise, new AWS foundation and new proof of concept to take their application to the next level.