Adapcare Gets 6x Faster Windows Workloads on AWS with Cambrian Technologies

Executive Summary

Healthcare company Adapcare migrated its on-premises Microsoft workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and improved performance by a factor of 6. In addition, the company can now build a new customer environment in minutes rather than the weeks it took previously. By using infrastructure as code and Amazon EC2, everything is easily and reliably replicable and customers benefit from better performance. Migrating to AWS, with help from AWS Partner Cambrian Technologies, also provides access to machine learning and artificial intelligence services to add more value for customers by adding data-driven products to Adapcare’s platform.

Migrating Windows Workloads for Flexibility and Scale

Adapcare builds systems to support healthcare and social care providers in the Netherlands. The company provides electronic healthcare records, along with scheduling and shift management systems, to 50,000 health professionals. As it grows, the company is attracting larger customers, which increases the strain on its infrastructure and its infrastructure team.

Although its business began as a software provider, the company saw that customers increasingly wanted their products to be delivered as software as a service (SaaS). To do that, Adapcare learned to operate its own infrastructure to serve its customers while being careful to maintain its margins.

The time spent on managing hardware and operating systems was a drag on the team. “We were hosting services in a data center, which meant updating and patching servers and all the complex maintenance required to ensure good service delivery for our customers,” says Ramon Postulart, technical director and responsible for product development, software development, and infrastructure at Adapcare. “We lacked flexibility and scalability, and were vulnerable because we’re a small team. We were also having performance problems—our database can get up to 4,000 calls per second. Onboarding bigger customers meant more strain on systems and support teams.”

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They are great to work with, had the right expertise, and were available night and day when we needed support.”

Ramon Postulart
Technical Director, Software Development and Infrastructure, Adapcare

Cloud Exceeds Performance Targets and Meets Business Case

Adapcare decided to work with AWS Partner Cambrian Technologies to plan and execute a test migration to AWS. Adapcare also ran a proof of concept on another cloud provider that achieved a tripling in performance compared to Adapcare’s on-premises infrastructure. But a similar test on AWS produced performance results that were 6 times better than its on-premises systems delivered and twice as fast as the other cloud provider. By fine-tuning the sizing and speed of the AWS environment, Adapcare’s EHR system achieved 36 percent better performance and reduced costs by 22 percent compared to the other cloud provider.

Working with Cambrian Technologies gave Adapcare access to the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) and associated support and resources. “We really understood their business challenges,” says Dionysis Linardatos, co-founder and director at Cambrian Technologies. “But it was still amazing to get a six-fold jump in performance.” Cambrian Technologies had worked with Adapcare previously when AWS suggested it would make a good implementation partner. “They are great to work with, had the right expertise, and were available night and day when we needed support,” says Postulart. “We ran a proof of concept with real, anonymized data to validate that performance was as good as we expected. Then we built the business case to validate that we could run a customer environment at the right price to be competitive.”

Adapcare decided to migrate its entire platform to AWS, onboarding one customer at a time, in a monthly cadence. Previously, it took up to 2 months to prepare systems for a new customer environment, but with infrastructure as code (IaC), it can be done in a few minutes. Aside from improving speed, automation also removes the possibility of human error when setting up new environments. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is used to provide secure, resizable compute capacity and Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling helps to automatically add or remove Amazon EC2 instances using predefined scaling policies.

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We really understood their business challenges. But it was still amazing to get a 6-fold jump in performance.”

Dionysis Linardatos
Co-founder and Director, Cambrian Technologies

Better Performance and New AI and Analytics

The migration has freed Adapcare from worrying about infrastructure and maintenance issues. The response from customers has been positive because they can see the benefits in terms of resilience and hope to see stable prices as a result. “We also know that we’re better able to make small improvements continuously,” says Postulart. “And our customers are going to benefit with new features and better performance.”

Adapcare and Cambrian Technologies are also working to migrate the backend of the mobile application connected to the Adapcare EHR system. The goal is to enable the backend to run on Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)—which can run highly secure, reliable, and scalable containers—and Amazon DocumentDB (with MongoDB compatibility), which can scale enterprise workloads with ease using a fully managed native JSON document database.

Although pleased with the migration, the team is not standing still. The team is focused on migrating all customers to AWS and closing the data center entirely within 2 years. “Right now, we’re just running virtual machines on AWS, but AWS also gives us access to so many innovative services,” says Postulart. “We’re looking at generative AI, and what other services we can utilize on AWS.”

Adapcare

About Adapcare

Netherlands-based Adapcare provides an electronic health records (EHR) system and scheduling and shift management systems for healthcare and social care providers. It serves 50,000 health professionals as users and has evolved from being primarily a software provider to doing business using a software as a service (SaaS) model.

AWS Services Used

Benefits

  • 6x faster than on-premises systems
  • New customer environments in minutes not weeks
  • Ready for innovation and AI
  • Ability to add even large customers quickly

About AWS Partner Cambrian Technologies

It is the mission of Cambrian Technologies to help organizations take advantage of the possibilities offered by public cloud technologies. Its motivation is to help its clients transition to AWS faster and easier, and to benefit more. Cambrian Technologies was established in 2018 with offices in the Netherlands, Greece, and the US. It serves customers around the world.

Published March 2024