Using Infrastructure as Code to Improve the Patient Experience

The opportunity to roll up our sleeves on this project would not have been possible without a team of 130 people who had already built the front end features of the platform. With a robust interface in place, our job was to get it operationally sound in time for a go-live date, and beyond.

In order to ensure the application is running effectively over time, the first six months were dedicated to aligning the development, quality assurance, and IT operations teams over a unified DevOps culture and set of processes. 

In establishing a DevOps framework, the client’s development teams were able to deploy future updates in Azure and “stand up” servers in an automated fashion using Infrastructure as Code (IaC). The scripted production environment eliminates room for human error and integrates across multiple environments, such as web servers, application servers, databases, and others.

In just six months, our client was equipped with a deployment pipeline, tools, and processes that would allow for automated deployment and testing in the cloud. 

Investing in Infrastructure as Code immediately proved to be crucial. Typically, a systems administrator would have to spend hours, if not days, managing multiple environments, a load balancer, one or more web servers, database servers, and queue processing systems.

To simplify and speed up the workflow, we defined the basic building blocks necessary for the application to scale, and with defined IaC libraries, configuration took the form of a code file, making it easier to edit, copy, and distribute. With the go-live date quickly approaching, deployment and testing times were reduced to just minutes.

The outcome demonstrated the advantages of DevOps and Infrastructure as Code. Deployment time and frequency improved dramatically, environment configuration speed improved, and feature toggling became a new capability that made bug fixes easy.