Executive Summary

As GreaterGas experienced rapid growth, it became difficult for their small internal IT team to manage its complex Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. To solve this challenge, the firm turned to Avahi Technologies, which assessed the environment using the AWS Well- Architected Framework and discovered scalability, reliability, security, and cost-efficiency is- sues. Avahi then addressed these issues by designing a modernized serverless environment running on an infrastructure-as-code infrastructure that streamlines DevOps processes and reduces the cost of the cloud environment. The customer can now deploy applications and scale compute resources faster while also ensuring the security of its AWS environment.

About the Customer

Based in the U.S., GreaterGas is a healthcare industry leader that provides full anesthesia services to hospitals, surgery centers, and doctor offices. Specific services include anesthesiology, billing, and practice management.

Customer Challenge: Enable Small Internal IT Team to Manage Complex Cloud Environment As the customer experienced rapid growth, it became difficult for the small internal IT team to manage the Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment. Adding to the challenge was a range of applications developed by third-party partners, which had created complex application interdependencies across the application architecture.

Given that hospitals providing critical patient care are the target customer segment, the firm cannot afford any downtime of the cloud services. The application architecture in the cloud must also be secure because of the sensitivity of healthcare information.

To take on these challenges, the senior leadership team hoped to gain centralized management over the cloud architecture and applications to enable the IT team to efficiently maintain infrastructure and application performance. As part of the process, the customer also identified this as an opportunity to assess its current AWS environment to modernize the infrastructure and leverage the latest AWS technologies.

Partner Solution: Avahi Assesses Architecture for Improvement Opportunities To identify a partner to assist with the modernization project, the customer first turned to its trusted cloud partner—AWS. AWS recommended collaborating with Avahi Technologies, which specializes in AWS migrations and modernization projects for rapidly-growing firms.

Avahi first assessed the customer’s environment using the AWS Well-Architected Framework as a guide.

This involved analyzing the architecture for operational processes, security, reliability, performance, cost optimization, and sustainability. After scanning the infrastructure code, Avahi discovered scalability, reliability, and security issues.

Key components of the Avahi modernization solution include a new data warehouse database—configured with Amazon QuickSight for business intelligence reporting and analytics. Avahi also set up full CI/CD (continuous integration and deployment) processes using AWS CodePipeline. This allows the customer’s developers to deploy applications and updates faster while also making it easier for the operations team to manage the AWS environment.

With the AWS solution that Avahi designed, configured and deployed, the customer now has a modern AWS environment. This includes an infrastructure-as-code architecture, which automates infrastructure updates and new implementations. Avahi also migrated the customer’s workloads to a containerized Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) serverless cluster that uses AWS Fargate as a compute engine and AWS Glue for data integration.

Results and Benefits: Improved Reliability and Security with Reduced Costs To improve reliability, Avahi migrated the databases from a single availability zone into multiple availability zones. In addition to reducing application latency by delivering applications closer to end-users, the multiple zones back each other up. Should one zone experience an outage, Avahi configured the system to failover to another zone while also meeting the customer’s recovery time and recovery point objectives.

For a stronger security posture, Avahi deployed AWS Secrets Manager to protect user credentials. Complimenting this service is AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), which makes sure only authorized users can interact with the cloud platform.

To enhance user experiences, Amazon Route 53—a domain name system service—efficiently connects user requests to applications while Amazon CloudWatch allows the customer to monitor compute resources. To monitor application performance, Avahi set up application code scanning with SonarQubean open source platform that continuously inspects code quality to check for vulnerabilities and performance issues.

Another key benefit for the customer is scalability. The infrastructure-as-code environment automatically scales compute resources up and down so the customer can easily adjust to changing workloads on database services. And with centralized control over the architec ture, the customer can accurately track cloud costs.

GreaterGas Says

“Working with Avahi wasn’t just about cutting-edge solutions; it was about a partnership where their team’s patience and availability played a pivotal role in enhancing our project’s success. As a testament to their track record, they impressed us with a deep understanding of our needs, and their cloud expertise provided the foundation we needed. Avahi isn’t just a service provider; they’re a reliable ally— turning challenges into opportunities with unwaver- ing support.” – Sheldon Shumway, CTO, GreaterGas & JD Shumway, Head of Data Engineer-ing, GreaterGas

About the Partner: Avahi Technologies

Avahi Technologies is a cloud-native focused company and Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner with a team of cloud, data, and software engineering experts and experiences obtained through years of working within the cloud ecosystem. An extraordinary team of highly-certified Avahi experts excels in architecting and operating secure, automated, cloud-based solutions built on AWS. With a focus on becoming an extension to existing customer teams, Avahi offers exceptional service and works tirelessly to build the right solutions to solve business problems.