Migration of Single-Tenant Electronic Medical Record Software Solution

Challenges

Following challenges were identified while the scoping discussions with the client:

• Scale and Complexity: Managing upgrades for 400 EC2 instances simultaneously posed a significant challenges across coordination, resource allocation, and risk management.
• Downtime Minimization: Minimizing downtime during the upgrade process was crucial to ensure uninterrupted business operations and avoid revenue loss.
• Automation and Coordination: Coordinating tasks across hundreds of machines required efficient automation and orchestration tools to streamline the process and minimize human error.
• Data Security and Compliance: As the application handles sensitive patient data, maintaining data security and compliance with healthcare regulations (e.g., HIPAA) throughout the migration process was critical.
• Quality Assurance: Rigorous testing and validation were essential to verify the functionality, performance, and compatibility of the migrated application with the updated infrastructure.

Solutions

EbizOn devised a comprehensive solution leveraging industry best practices and cutting-edge technologies:

• Planning and Preparation: Meticulous planning, conducting thorough assessments of the existing infrastructure, application dependencies, and compatibility requirements. Created a detailed roadmap with tasks and timelines for the upgrade process.
• Technology Stack: We opted for terraform to provision new EC2 instance. Airflow, an open-source workflow management platform, was deployed for task orchestration, providing a centralized platform for scheduling and monitoring upgrade tasks. Additionally, Ansible playbooks were utilized for executing OS updates, Progress OpenEdge version upgrades, and application validations.
• Automation and Orchestration: We developed custom Ansible playbooks to automat tasks such as creating snapshots, provisioning new instances, executing upgrade scripts, and performing post-upgrade validations. Airflow DAGs (Directed Acyclic Graphs) were configured to schedule and sequence tasks across the entire fleet of EC2 instances, ensuring smooth coordination and execution.
• Testing and Validation to ensure infrastructure reliability: This included regression testing to verify application functi onality, performance testing to assess system performance, and security scans to identify and remediate vulnerabilities.

Impact

• Enhanced Security and Compliance by migrating to newer EC2 instances with updated operating system versions and Progress OpenEdge
• Improved Performance and Scalability due to upgraded infrastructure
• Future Readiness through modernized infrastructure