Cotiviti adopts AWS PaaS for flexible, scalable, and cost-efficient cloud usage

SHI modernized our customer’s infrastructure with automated processes, reduced cloud spend, and simplified DevOps workflows.

Challenge:

Cotiviti, a health care analytics company, faced a fast-approaching DC/OS contract expiration. Coupling this with a gross oversizing of compute resources, Cotiviti needed to lower their cloud spend while also reducing server administration.

Cotiviti had a DC/OS-hosted Confluent Kafka implementation running Kafka Connect, Kafka Brokers, Kafka ZooKeeper, and Kafka engine. Their version of Kafka was deprecated and had reached end-of-life in 2017.

Their Kafka Broker and Connect configuration would translate the SQL queries from Oracle to the application databases running in their cloud database platforms. They would return application state data using Kafka Connect and Kafka Schema Registries and stream the output across message queues to the applications.

Cotiviti needed a partner with container experience to help their architecture take full advantage of their existing AWS services. The customer tasked SHI with building a solution that would save money, reduce administrative effort, modernize their architecture, and automate their deployment process.

Solution:

SHI’s cloud experts rearchitected the existing solution to take advantage of AWS Native services, including AWS EKS and Fargate. Doing so eliminated the need of third-party licensing and reduced the customer’s cloud spend. The adoption of Native Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS) also allowed Cotiviti to free resources dedicated to server administration and refocus on customer-facing activities.

To ensure the new architecture worked seamlessly with the customer’s existing environment, SHI:

• Integrated the customer’s new solutions into their existing Transit Gateway, creating a managed hub and spoke environment.
• Deployed a Kubernetes dashboard to grant personnel visibility of metrics, state data, and inventory.
• Implemented Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Configuration as Code (CaC) via CI/CD pipelines to reduce defects caused by manual intervention.

Outcome:

Adoption of AWS PaaS allowed the customer to utilize the scale and elasticity of cloud resources with a turnkey experience. This not only yielded cost savings via licensing and EC2 instance run times, but also reduced administrative overhead due to the managed nature of PaaS services.

Codifying their entire deployment process, including infrastructure and configuration, enabled the customer to be nimble in the cloud space and cemented best practices for a more mature DevOps strategy.

The solution was immediately more manageable, as each deployment had a predictable output with each run. With the new deployment process, the customer’s entire application stack could deploy into multiple environments, reusing the same parametrized scripts in a fraction of the previous time.

With a single click, the customer's newly created DevOps automation process could deploy the entire configuration in a portable and rapid application. Cotiviti now had a repeatable, correctly configured implementation each time they needed to rebuild, scale, or replicate their environments.