A US healthcare technology company needed 100% uptime during its critical annual compliance and reporting window for hundreds of health providers. They had missed that mark four years running. There was no AWS automation, no DevOps capability, no continuous delivery pipeline. Monitoring, support tooling, and compliance automation all had to be built from the ground up. The deadline was 3 months to be ready for the February processing window.
The Engagement
I built the DevOps team from scratch and started with the fundamentals. I worked with the cybersecurity team to define governance and compliance controls for the cloud environments and codified them in Terraform, giving the new team a foundation that was compliant by default. I right-sized the AWS environment, eliminating waste that produced a 30% spend reduction within the first 60 days.
The Django-based platform and engineering processes had to be redesigned to support a continual release strategy with extensive testing. I re-architected the monolithic application into three independent services, each with its own deployment lifecycle and failure boundary, so a problem in one area no longer cascaded into the reporting workflow. I introduced a modern SPA-based deployment for the React frontend, decoupling UI releases from backend changes. Automated test coverage went from 20% to 80%, with tests running on every code push. Deployment time dropped from 30 days to 2 hours.
SOC2 audit evidence gathering had been a manual process consuming two weeks per cycle. I automated it, compressing collection to two hours. I restructured AWS environments for HIPAA alignment and trained the InfoSec team on controls and logging. The DevOps engineers were embedded directly into the development squads, and the operating model extended to the Serverless and Data Engineering teams.
Results
- 100% uptime during the compliance and reporting window, after four consecutive years of failures.
- 30% AWS spend reduction within 60 days through right-sizing.
- SOC2 evidence collection: 2 weeks compressed to 2 hours.
- Deployment time: 30 days reduced to 2 hours.
- Test coverage: 20% to 80%, enforced on every push.
- Processing time: 200% improvement across hundreds of health providers, variance stabilized to +/- 10% from a prior 500%.