3x cost optimization for leading free telemedicine solution providers

The company's HIPAA compliance had been ensured by a third-party contractor which provided ready-to-use servers and MySQL databases that were pre-configured to follow HIPAA requirements. Since most of the AWS tools are HIPAA compliant by-default, we decided to migrate the company's infrastructure to AWS which not only would ensure compliance and allow for quick and safe scaling, but would also optimize infrastructure expenses.

Migrating to AWS allowed the team to ensure quick and secure service all over the world. All the services used to build the infrastructure are secure, highly available, and easy to maintain. The simplicity and the beneficial cooperation conditions with AWS became an essential factor while choosing a cloud provider. One more critical factor is that many AWS services are compliant to different security standards by default. This allowed us to eliminate the need for a third-party servers provider and cut cloud expenses threefold.

OpsWorks Co. main goal was to introduce cost reduction without affecting performance and security. Our experts decided to avoid re-architecting at this point, but in the future we are going to build everything on top of AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service, giving us even more efficiency and availability.

During the migration we discovered a bottleneck in the docker-flow-proxy configuration that was an initial single-thread, and as result Docker Swarm workers were under-utilized. After fine-tuning docker-flow-proxy, we were able to utilize all CPU cores equally and reduce the number of worker EC2 instances without affecting the overall performance.