Why Evolve Moved to AWS
This week Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched their latest region in the U.K. (number 16 worldwide, in case you’re counting). Whether you work in government, finance, transport or education this is hugely significant news. But, if like me you work in healthcare, the advent of a competitive, secure, hyper scale cloud located within the U.K. is especially important and has the potential to transform how health IT is delivered to the NHS.
In Evolve we strongly believe in the cloud. All new product lines we build are designed to be cloud-only and recently we made the decision to be AWS-only. Cloud-only was a really big decision for us, especially as we work in healthcare, where cloud adoption is still in the early stages, when compared to many other industries. However, the tide is definitely turning. A year ago I was being challenged hard and frequently on “why cloud-only?”, but I get this question less and less now. What I get more of now is “Ok, I get the cloud, but why AWS-only?”
Given the breadth, depth, quality and speed of innovation at AWS (evidenced again recently by @werner’s keynote at re:invent) my short answer is typically “Why NOT AWS?”, but the longer answer always comes back to the following key points.
1. Trust — this should be top of most people’s list when they talk about why they selected a particular cloud provider, and for me it is vital that trust is established early. This is especially important when you are hosting your ‘Crown Jewels’ on someone else’s technology. The support we get from AWS is top drawer. When we made the cloud-only decision their solution architects worked long and hard with us on the design of our new Integrated Care Platform. They helped us build a secure, scalable and performant service, that was easy to monitor and maintain. When the AWS UK Region was announced they worked closely with us to ensure N3 connectivity into the Region. As we transition to HSCN, next year, AWS experts will again be at our side to ensure a smooth transition. We’ve had overwhelming support from our customers in our AWS-only strategy, which further demonstrates the trust that not only we have in AWS, but that our customers have too.
2. Broad services with deep functionality — Whether you are talking about compute, databases, encryption or access control the breadth and depth of services is second to none. On the face of it this obviously sounds great, but why is this actually important? The simple reason is that it lets us focus on what we do best, which is building world class applications to transform healthcare. I don’t have the people and I don’t want the hassle of managing my databases, so I use AWS RDS and I let AWS worry about all the operational concerns such as availability, failover and backups. In the future I may not even want to worry about infrastructure so I will use AWS Lambda so I don’t need to think about servers. The list goes on but in total we use over 20 AWS services that make our life simpler and this list continues to grow on a weekly basis.
3. Innovation — every year AWS launch 100’s of new services. Some are big and some are small and you may not use them all but what AWS are doing is building an incredible kitbag for developers to help them build amazing applications and get their products to market quickly. @ajassy talks about giving customers super-powers and while clearly he is not being literal it really can feel like this sometimes. Just this month alone there have been some amazing announcements which will directly benefit Evolve and our customers. In particular I’m talking about things like AWS Glue to help us manage our ETL pipelines, PostgreSQL support for Aurora helping us deliver hyper scale, hyper performant workloads on PostgreSQL and things like AWS Athena and Amazon QuickSight to help us surface first class analytics within our platform. You don’t get this anywhere else and while everyone else is trying to catch-up, AWS are blazing ahead with more and more innovation.
4. The “ilities” — You may have heard of the “iliites”, things like availability, stability, scalability and other non-functional quality attributes that judge the operation of a system. We have a guiding principle in Evolve whereby anything that compromises performance, security or data integrity must be optional. This is a really difficult principle to adhere to but we get a lot of help by using many of the AWS services, especially when it comes to security and compliance, which are key concerns in healthcare. Just look at their approach to HIPAA compliance, encryption, key management, performance, etc. etc. We get all this out of the box helping us focus on building great product and delivering a great service to our customers.
5. Global Reach — Evolve started life as a product for the NHS but we have grown and expanded over the years with customers now in North America and hopefully this growth will continue in the coming months and years. AWS are continuing to grow and expand their global footprint too. This week we had the new AWS Region launched in the UK, last week their Central Canada Region launched and there are more coming soon. This gives us confidence that as we continue to grow we have a partner in AWS, with a global footprint that can support us as we scale, enabling us to focus on what’s important to our customers and build world class applications that are easy to develop, deploy, maintain, monitor and secure. We do this using many native AWS services directly, without having to build layers and layers of abstraction to cater for potentially different cloud providers in the future.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but as every day passes our decision to build exclusively on AWS looks like the best decision we could ever have made. Even if they stopped innovating today we would be happy, but the exciting thing is they haven’t. I can’t wait to see what’s next and especially what opportunities it will bring for Evolve and our customers.
