How HealthEdge®maintained data sovereignty in the cloud with Redpanda BYOC

Challenge

A lean team struggles with time-consuming and costly platform management

For years, digital healthcare solutions provider HealthEdge relied on Confluent for Kubernetes to manage their Apache Kafka® clusters. It got the job done, but for DevOps Manager Ted O’Hayer and his small team of four, waking up in the middle of the night to address issues with Confluent and their Kafka ecosystem was a regular occurrence.

“I’ve been responsible for carrying the pager and getting up at three in the morning when something needed to be fixed,” O’Hayer says. “It was a huge burden on our team to troubleshoot Confluent when things went awry, ensure that it was rolling through our environments, and keep it up to date.”

“We needed something that was 100% compatible with Kafka that we could simply drop in to replace Confluent.”

Kafka plays a critical role within HealthEdge’s digital care management platform, Wellframe™, which operates on a containerized microservice architecture running on Kubernetes. “We had a lot of manual configuration, even with Confluent’s Kubernetes offering,” says O’Hayer. “It was a lot of work, especially when spinning up new services or clusters.” The services communicate by sending messages over Kafka. HealthEdge also uses Kafka to stream chat messages and alerts in Wellframe and obtain eligibility information from customers.

The mounting cost of Confluent, coupled with the platform’s high level of complexity, made it challenging to meet business needs. O’Hayer sought a more cost-effective solution that would ease his team’s workload without compromising on reliability, efficacy, and security.

There was also an additional hurdle: typical SaaS solutions weren’t a good option as HealthEdge must keep patients’ sensitive medical data within their own infrastructure in compliance with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) privacy and security standards.

Soltuion

A bring-your-own-cloud offering that ensures data privacy and security

HealthEdge partnered with Redpanda and their bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC) solution to make it easier to manage Kafka clusters within their own environment. “Redpanda stood out because of the BYOC offering,” O’Hayer says. “It’s a Goldilocks solution for us. It fits our needs perfectly, providing mutual TLS support and a managed suite of connectors. It’s a fully managed platform that doesn’t leave our infrastructure. That was very hard to find.”

BYOC allows the HealthEdge team to stay compliant and protect customer data without the need to monitor and maintain their Kafka ecosystem. “Using BYOC means we don’t have to go through additional security approvals for using an external partner,” O’Hayer explains.

Migrating to Redpanda was seamless. It was so simple that O’Hayer and his team created their first Redpanda BYOC cluster in about 10 minutes, with minimal disruption. “We’re running a live telemedicine platform, and people need to be able to reach their care managers. It can’t shut down,” O’Hayer says. “The Redpanda team supported the production migration, and our experience was great.”

Leveraging Redpanda also simplifies the monitoring tasks that the DevOps team wants to keep in-house. Developers can use their portal to check the status of Kafka topics and access control lists (ACLs), in addition to broker status. Through Redpanda’s Prometheus endpoint, O’Hayer has fast access to key metrics so the team can spot opportunities for improvement. “With Redpanda, everything is much simpler and easy to use,” O’Hayer says.

Results

Removing the Kafka management burden to drive real business impact

By choosing Redpanda, HealthEdge has found simplicity and freedom. “It’s a relief to have the team of experts at Redpanda watching for and responding to issues,” O’Hayer says. “I sleep much more soundly because I know they’re on it.”

The HealthEdge team is now freed to focus on driving value with their development projects instead of constant monitoring. By delivering increased flexibility and new features, Redpanda has opened a world of possibilities to the DevOps team. “It’s really easy to use and it gets developers excited, so it was an unqualified success,” O’Hayer says.

Switching from Confluent to Redpanda also came with significant operational cost and time savings. “Redpanda architecture is much simpler,” O’Hayer says. “Because there are fewer moving parts than the Confluent platform, we can save money on the nodes running on Kafka.”

But this change ultimately benefits HealthEdge customers the most. For their core Wellframe platform, which sees messages sent between patients and care managers, Redpanda’s Kafka management ensures both compliance and uptime. Partnering with Redpanda means healthcare customers are cared for and always have access to the services they need.

“We can rely on Redpanda to manage Kafka for us, patch it, update it, and monitor it. Redpanda helps us deliver on our SLAs and keep data secure to comply with healthcare’s strict privacy and security standards.”

O’Hayer’s DevOps team can finally say goodbye to late-night calls and rest easy, knowing their platform has the data needed to support patients around the clock.