Success Story
Accelerating product release cycle and content distribution with AWS Lambda
About the client
The client is a London-based healthcare provider that offers personalized care and planning solutions for cancer survivors. It provides personalized expertise from cancer dieticians, physiotherapists, psychologists, and special nurses through its one-of-a-kind mHealth app. The healthcare organization helps cancer survivors to assess & track their state of health through a starter health kit, and the data received through it further helps in doctor-patient consultation.
- 20% increase in deployment frequency
- 5% change failure rate
- 30 mins avg MTTR
Business Situation
For frequent release of application updates, the healthcare provider had set up DevOps services in place. However, their DevOps practices were encountering a few challenges that needed to be addressed for enabling rapid product innovation. The UK-based cancer care provider thus chose Daffodil Software to fix the underlying challenges in the DevOps automation cycle. The selection was done basis of Daffodil’s proven experience in integrating scalable DevOps into a variety of projects, especially in the healthcare domain.
There were two prime challenges in the automation cycle that needed to be addressed:
- The healthcare app development project followed a multi-branching approach which is not supported by AWS. Thus, the development team had to manually update the branch name in the code pipeline, every time a new release was planned.
- The in-house team at the cancer care provider’s end had to manually invalidate the Cloudfront cache whenever a new deployment was done.
The Solution
To resolve the DevOps automation challenges, team Daffodil backed the DevOps services with AWS Lambda, which is an event-driven, serverless computing platform for cloud applications.
Automating branch updation in CI/CD Pipeline
To resolve the manual branch updation problem in the CI/CD pipeline, a Lambda function was used. Whenever a new branch is created in the code commit, a Lambda function is triggered from Cloudwatch events. The Lambda function would deploy a CloudFormation stack that creates new pipelines on spot for the new launch.
Automate invalidation of CloudFront cache
The cancer care provider was utilizing CloudFront, an AWS Content Delivery Network (CDN) for faster access to content in various geographic locations. To keep the content updated on all the edges after deployment is done, invalidating the CDN cache is important. This critical task was done manually by the in-house development team of the healthcare provider.
To overcome this challenge, team Daffodil automated this process of invalidating the CloudFront cache by using the AWS Lambda function. This not only reduced the manual effort of updation but also ensured that there is no delay in invalidating the cache, which could refrain several users from accessing the updated version of the app or its content.
The Impact
By using the AWS Lambda function, the London-based healthcare provider has addressed key challenges in the DevOps automation cycle. By automating branch updation, the overall speed of deployment was increased by 20%. In addition to this, automating the cache invalidation ensured that an updated app is accessible to users of all the geographies, without any delay.
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