How Cambia supercharged their Amazon EKS based platform (ARC212)

Migration to Amazon EKS: A Healthcare Platform's Journey

Introduction

  • The speaker, Kyle Murphy, is a Platform Infrastructure Engineer at Canopy Health Solutions, a large healthcare company.
  • Canopy Health Solutions manages multiple health plans and uses technology to assist their millions of members and their families with their healthcare journey.
  • The company is passionate about open-source and is a non-profit member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

Challenges with Amazon ECS

  • Canopy Health Solutions previously used Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and CloudFormation for their platform.
  • Challenges they faced included:
    • Lack of observability for developers into their deployments
    • Difficulty with autoscaling
    • Limited third-party vendor support due to security and compliance requirements

Migration to Amazon EKS

  • The decision to migrate to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) was driven by the availability of budget, security considerations, and the maturity of the Kubernetes ecosystem.
  • Benefits of Amazon EKS:
    • Managed Kubernetes control plane
    • Community support and integration with AWS services
    • Native integration with tools like Helm, Istio, and Datadog

Implementation Details

  • Terraform Enterprise is used to create and update the EKS clusters and install Helm charts.
    • This aligns with the company's philosophy of using managed services wherever possible.
  • Istio service mesh is used for improved observability and mTLS encryption between services.
  • Datadog helps with visualization, monitoring, and problem detection.
  • Tilt and kind are used for local development and testing.

Challenges and Solutions

  • Parallel pipelines for CloudFormation and Terraform/Helm
    • Addressed by using CloudFormation outputs and custom pipeline code.
  • Developer prioritization and change management
    • Addressed by making the migration process easy for developers and hiring contractors to assist.
  • Ensuring no downtime during migration
    • Achieved through weighted DNS routing and an Ingress Gateway.

Improvements and Future Plans

  • Improved developer experience and productivity
  • Automated autoscaling
  • Adoption of Amazon Bottlerocket, a container-optimized operating system
  • Expanded use of Argo for GitOps-based deployments

Conclusion

  • Canopy Health Solutions successfully migrated from 100% Amazon ECS to 100% Amazon EKS.
  • The migration brought about improvements in security, observability, and developer experience.
  • The company plans to further expand its use of Amazon EKS and explore additional technologies like Argo for GitOps-based deployments.

Resources

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