About the Client
An industry leader in pharmacy software and patient-facing technology, Healthera’s flagship product is a prescription app for the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) that is free to end users. It streamlines the healthcare ecosystem and communication channels for the benefit of patients, pharmacies and the NHS.
We worked with Healthera to quickly implement CI/CD pipelines following an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Well-Architected Review. This enhanced the speed and reliability of software production, boosting performance and releasing developer time for innovation and experimentation.
Challenge: Prioritising Areas for improvement
As a successful health tech transitioning from start-up to scale-up, Healthera is focusing on ways to strengthen its underlying infrastructure. This needs to go hand-in-hand with ongoing innovation as the business continues finding new ways to add value to key audiences.
In January 2020, we were appointed to conduct a Well-Architected Review of Healthera’s cloud-based IT set-up. This process, devised by AWS and offered free of charge, helps cloud-based organisations assess infrastructure security, performance, resilience and efficiency through comparison with the AWS Well-Architected Framework.
The review indicated that improvements could be made to the process for getting new features into production. We were then enlisted to help re-engineer pipelines for quicker, more reliable performance.
“The transition from Well-Architected Review to remediation was quick and seamless. Knowing [the team] had the insights and technical skills to help gave us confidence and made the whole process hassle-free.”
Jun Seki
Healthera CTO
Solution: Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery Holds the Answers
We focused on three core services underpinning Healthera’s business, the API, user authentication and account management. After evaluating existing processes, we set about developing a CI/CD pipeline for each service, ensuring adherence to modern good practices.
The central purpose of any CI/CD pipeline is to control and automate the flow of changes from version control commit to deployment to production. A commit from a developer triggers:
- code linting to ensure agreed coding standards are followed
- automated tests to check features have not been broken by mixing old code with new
- deployment to different environments depending on the branch the code was committed to.
All of this is achieved without any manual intervention, making the process quick and repeatable. What’s more, code cannot move beyond a certain stage if it fails predefined criteria for progression. This gives confidence that any deployed code meets quality standards. And it promotes good practice amongst technical teams, ensuring defects are not passed downstream.
We ensured Healthera’s existing tools and components were expertly pieced together to maximise simplicity and consistency.
Outcome: Speed and Reliability Reach New Levels
Our CI/CD pipelines have enabled Healthera to benefit from more seamless progression of new features from developers to customers. Changes happen more quickly and reliably, with modern IT best practice firmly embedded in the process. This will lead to additional quality gains in the longer term.
Healthera’s management team now have the assurance that every line of code is checked by an automated test suite. And developers are spared the tedium of manually moving changes between environments.
Overall, this creates a virtuous cycle of improvement: changes get into production more quickly and risk is reduced, so less time needs to be spent fixing problems.
“We derived exceptional value from our Well-Architected Review and subsequent engineering support. It’s well worth making time for the free review then acting fast to address any issues that are flagged.”
Jun Seki
Healthera CTO
This case study is based on work completed by DevOpsGroup before the team joined forces with Sourced Group, an Amdocs company.
