Solution: Modern Application Infrastructure
Field: Healthcare Technology
This Advizex customer provides highly specialized healthcare software that helps its customers to automate and achieve operational efficiencies and faster time-to-revenue.
It helps these healthcare practices, and their related healthcare providers, with business process automation that results in fewer manual steps to processing orders, appointments and more, so practitioners and admin can focus on their patients.
A relatively small organization, the company provides an all-in-one business solution to organizations across the U.S. through its a cloud-based solution that allows clients to use it anywhere from any device.
On the backend, the company operates on the AWS platform, using several AWS services to fuel the application. With such a focus on providing efficiency through technology to its clients, it’s no surprise that the company itself would strive for technology efficiency. This led it on a journey to implementing an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach to provisioning and managing its infrastructure using a DevOps methodology.
A need for experienced help
While experts, the company’s technology team were running into scaling issues since they were simultaneously in the process of rearchitecting their application.
They sought outside help, the timing and culture lined up particularly well with Advizex. As well, the technology team had for years focused on traditional infrastructure, so they were aided greatly by the Advizex Modern Apps Team’s deep experience in Infrastructure as Code models.
Advizex has recently expanded its Modern Apps Team, bringing on board Mike Ross as a Principal Platform Engineer. Ross’s past experiences as a DevOps consultant at AWS aligned well with the customer’s needs.
“It’s exciting what we’re doing with our Modern Apps Team,” says Austin Feinberg, Account Executive at Advizex. “It’s helping customers with essentially the new wave of running in the public cloud, achieving DevOps-like application rearchitecting. And Mike extends our skill set here, and it really helped with the customer.”
A Trusted Adviser
The Advizex Modern Apps Team stepped in to help augment the existing team as it undertook the major shift to an IaC model. Advizex worked with the company for two four-week development sprints.
With both organizations having highly collaborative and open cultures, it took little time before Advizex was making key recommendations based primarily on its combined expertise in cloud, Infrastructure-as-Code, and security.
“Once I had been exposed to their code, I could see how, if I were doing it from scratch, I would have done it differently,” Ross said. “So, I presented their CTO with a list of things I would change, and why, and they were well-received.”
Removing the grunt work
One of the most significant recommendations from the Advizex Modern Apps Team was to implement Terragrunt on the front end to eliminate the need to duplicate entry of back-end code for the company’s multiple environments — helping achieve a DRY (“don’t repeat yourself”) approach to its infrastructure code development.
While not on the original agenda when contacting Advizex, its recommended Terragrunt implementation proved a great benefit. It removed the complexity of top-level environment templates, reducing hundreds of lines of code down to a mere 20 or 30, making it easier to deploy new environments.
Importantly, even after Advizex’s engagement has been completed, Terragrunt is continuing to free up company resources and help it continue to meet its IaC goals as they evolve — with less staff requirements.
“It’s a way to accelerate their IaC development pace, because now they don’t have to do as much when they want to add a new module in, or some additional code or features,” Ross says.
As the company continues to modernize its application architecture, Advizex professional services continue to be engaged and the relationship continues to grow to take greater advantage of Advizex’s wide technology knowledge base.
For example, the two are now investigating how the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning can be incorporated into the application and how Advizex can assist them in reaching that goal.