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Through Cloud Co-Engineering, Sketch Guides Healthcare Client to More Value From AWS

case study setup

The Setup

In a previous engagement, Sketch Development Services provided the client with a Cloud Enablement strategy, laying out a plan to productize the Cloud Center of Excellence's (CCoE’s) services and tools for easier cloud adoption by our client’s development teams. The client then asked Sketch to help establish a backlog they could use to put the strategy into practice. Specifically, the client wanted an extra hand building products with AWS’ Cloud Development Kit (“CDK”).
case study challenge

The Challenge

The CCoE already had some tools in the form of CloudFormation templates, shell scripts, and even some Python CDK stacks. The goal was to use the CCoE's expertise to convert these tools into a product any number of development teams could use with relative ease. A toolset of this nature should:

  • Have a shallower learning curve to implement than the current toolset
  • Make it easier for users to adopt new versions when the CCoE deploys fixes, upgrades, or enhancements
  • Be adoptable by almost any dev team regardless of their programming language familiarity
  • Have common architectural patterns baked in so teams aren’t reinventing those wheels
  • Have guardrails in place to keep the development teams on a tried-and-true path that follows the client’s cloud governance and security principles
case study solution

The Solution

To meet the client's requirements, we worked with them toward four main objectives:

  1. Build a toolset (CCoE’s “product”) that the client’s other development teams can use
  2. Establish CCoE’s delivery strategy of these tools to development teams
  3. Automate speedy delivery of the toolset to the consumers when new features or bug-fixes need to be released
  4. Make it as easy as possible for development teams to implement the product in their own environment
case study results

The Results

We helped the CCoE team build:

  • A product line of 11 CDK constructs that generate Infrastructure-as-Code templates conforming to typical, approved the client’s architectures
  • A mechanism allowing CCoE to create the product line once, yet providing it to development teams in five total programming languages (Go, Java, .NET, Typescript, and Python)
  • Automated processes to test, build, and deploy updates and enhancements to the product line
  • Samples and documentation that 400+ teams can reference to help with the successful adoption of CCoE’s product

Sketch got the CCoE team on a well-established path to providing tools and materials to other development teams. The development teams gained the tools and skills required to do work without waiting for the CCoE team to do everything.

That is, every development team within the healthcare enterprise could had familiar tools they could use to create cloud infrastructure on their own, while ensuring compliance with HIPAA and internal cloud policies. That is, CDKTF allowed developers to use languages they already knew instead of having to use Terraform.

As a result, teams were empowered to efficiently move their applications from an on-prem environment into AWS.

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Feedback from the client

"This was an incredible partnership and we appreciate all the hard work and dedication to this project. We are excited about the future work this team will be able to produce.”

–Technical Manager

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