Hitting the Ground Running with Kubernetes

As Kubernetes continues to grow in popularity as a means to orchestrating containers, companies across industries are looking for ways to expedite their adoption.

Recently, we partnered with a leading healthcare industry SaaS provider in making the transition. This company has a platform that allows clinicians and patients to have easy access to digital health tools. 

The platform, which is embedded in electronic health records (EHRs), makes it easy for clinicians to prescribe and monitor health content, apps, devices, and services within their charting workflows.

The company had been using AWS to run its platform for a while, leveraging Amazon’s elastic containers service (ECS) to handle orchestration. But, as the company wanted to scale its platform more efficiently, it was looking to adopt Kubernetes—and the Amazon elastic Kubernetes service (EKS)—in order to gain flexibility in where workloads could happen. So they reached out to us.

A path to adoption

A chief concern of the company about moving to Kubernetes was whether the practices it put in place during the move would carry it past the adoption and into the future.

Its primary ask was for assistance with the quirks of EKS, Lambda, and S3. It also needed help determining the right Kubernetes security platform to use—a major concern given its work within the healthcare industry.

Our solution was to provide the company with a Kubernetes and DevOps architect from our team to help guide the adoption of EKS and integrate the tool within its existing tech stack.

We began with a thorough review of the company’s existing AWS environment, including its security practices at the cluster infrastructure level. We then worked with the company to make recommendations for:

• A service mesh strategy
• Improving CI/CD pipelines
• Developing a load testing strategy
• Implementing cluster level scaling

In addition, we developed and implemented DevOps automation, including infrastructure as code for automating deployments. 

Hitting the ground running

As a result of its engagement with us, the healthcare SaaS provider has been able to successfully complete its adoption of Kubernetes and has transitioned from ECS to EKS to orchestrate its workloads. 

With automation fully in place, the company has also solidified its security posture within its environments and is continuing to expand its cloud environments beyond AWS.

If your organization is considering adopting Kubernetes, containers, or the cloud—or if you want to learn more about AWS and EKS specifically—schedule some time to chat with our experts.