Clirinx is an award winning clinical research software system (CTMS) that enables internet-based clinical research and team science to accelerate discovery of new cures and better treatments.
They have chosen AWS as the platform on which to deploy and host their application stack for their clients. Each new client is required to create and own an AWS account in which Clirinx deploys and maintains an instance for their application.
Clirinx wanted to be able to provide consistent deployments of their application for different client in separate AWS accounts owned by the client. With no client capabilities or technical teams for deploy and ongoing maintainence. The obvious next step for Clirinx was to automated the deployment and maintenance of their application stack in AWS, and they choose TerraAlto as their AWS Technical Consulting partner to work with them on this.
Solution
Our team conducted a workshop with the Clirinx development team to develop an IAC deployment of the application stack using AWS Cloudformation to deploy AWS VPC network, AWS Identity & Access Management, AWS S3, AWS RDS, Elastic Load Balancing, AWS Auto Scaling and Amazon Elasticache. The application has a boot strapped installation from an S3 based application deployment archive.
Standardized new client deployments are done using the AWS CloudFormation templates from above.
Outcomes
- Clirinx has been able to develop a simple, intuitive, reliable and secure web application.
- They have a modern technology stack that is reliable with minimal maintenance and consistent high availability.
- They have eliminated the need for on-premises infrastructure and freed up valuable resources to focus on adding value to their core business.
- They have benefited from improved cost efficiency, scalability, business continuity and time to market.
- They have automated infrastructure and code deployment.Development team can now work independently of DevOPs team and other teams on application development, testing and deployment, but a consistent standard is being maintained for operational and compliance purpose.
- New client deployment times have been reduced from weeks of cooperative engagement to 2 hours.
- Billable time for new client deployments has been reduced by 90%.
Lessons learned
- Stable and scalable application stacks that meet all the needs of some business models can be be relatively simple Cloudformation templates, sometimes the enabling power of AWS is in the straighforward usage of standard services.