DevOps Optimization for Healthcare Solutions Company

Client:
Healthcare Solutions Company

Industry:
Fintech for Healthcare

Technology and Platforms:
Golang, PHP, AWS, Kubernetes, Datadog

The client's platform brings cohesive payment experiences to healthcare providers, patients, and third-party collection agencies, from online bill pay solutions to provider-facing payment integrations. As a PCI DSS Level 1 Service Provider, the company belongs to an elite group of organizations worldwide that have earned HITRUST CSF Certified status, proving their continued commitment to managing risk and improving payment security and compliance.

Challenge

The client had experienced significant business growth, but at the same time, delivery was slowing down due to two decades worth of technical debt on a monolithic architecture. They needed to stabilize their current platform and begin planning for the future. 

As the company was set to embark on its digital transformation initiative, it brought Forte Group in to help plan for an enterprise re-platforming initiative. After initial discussions and understanding various internal constraints, it was determined that the initial effort should be more focused on improving their DevOps maturity levels before beginning the re-platforming initiative.

Business Challenges

• Implement project execution best practices to overcome technical hurdles
• Instill DevOps guidance and expertise to improve operations
• Solve all of the pending tech-related issues and focus more on expanding the team’s skill set and expertise
• Improve short-term and long-term project planning
• Switch the project mindset from a reactive philosophy to a proactive one — to prevent burning issues instead of settling them urgently

Feature-based Challenges

• Move on from a monolithic, hard-to-maintain application with multiple points of failure to a more controllable and flexible setup 
• Exterminate multiple production downtimes and allow for more observability for future issues
• Improve the application uptime, as well as implement bases for future application re-platforming

Solution

During the discovery phase, It became apparent that, organizationally, the enterprise was not ready for an entire re-platforming. At the same time, there was an immediate opportunity to improve operations (DevOps).

The Forte team pivoted and decided to attach to their goal to level up their DevOps maturity alongside a good release strategy based 100% on an automated process.

Further into the project, Forte team engineers took a role as an example for the client's delivery team in the DevOps “ways of work.” Forte experts could also help the internal section in an internal project without the expertise or time to execute.

As a result of a joint effort and a significant shift in the delivery philosophy, the final solution was a system with proper monitoring and alert systems in place. Organized workflows and established internal operations reduced the number of unexpected issues and significantly reduced the application’s downtime, which reflected positively on the business.

• Replacing and automating infrastructure for 10+ manually created environments to maintain similar tooling and maintenance
• Updating all tools to the latest version to improve functionalities
• Accelerating the delivery with an SCRUM methodology involving the customer in the main ceremonies
• Engaging with Datadog as Forte Partners to define and design an observability plan POC

Outcomes of the first stage of the project

• Created a delivery platform to support Microservice Oriented Solutions based on Kubernetes
• Improved the release process and strategy using a Gitops methodology
• 5 applications migrated to the new environment
• Designed and built a Proof of Concept for observability for operations and to improve the development experience
• Introduced an Agile Scrum methodology for the DevOps team