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.
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