Bamboo Health minimizes downtime for critical services with Amazon RDS blue/green deployments

In the world of prescription drug monitoring, pharmacies rely on continuous access to data and software for responding to vital patient needs. This post highlights how one digital healthcare technology organization, Bamboo Health, provides critical access to prescription-monitoring services with the help of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS).

Bamboo Health empowers life-improving actions during pivotal care moments for individuals by working with healthcare organizations. Bamboo Health operates one of the nation’s most powerful care collaboration networks, providing Real-Time Care Intelligence to enable seamless care coordination, leading to higher quality and cost-effective whole person healthcare.​

Bamboo Health’s technology platform connects patients with the care they need when they need it most across 50 US states and territories. One key aspect of this technology is empowering providers, pharmacists, and care teams nationwide with a more complete picture of controlled substance use to drive better patient outcomes. That means more than 3,300 transactions per second across databases for each state, some with tables in the double-digit terabyte size range. One pharmacy client reported a reduction of pharmacists’ time to access patient records from 5-plus minutes to just 15 seconds.

When the time came for a major PostgreSQL version update for their production databases, the stakes were high. Pharmacies depend on Bamboo Health’s PMP Gateway and AWARxE solutions to validate information before filling prescriptions. Authorized medical professionals, such as physicians and pharmacists, use Bamboo’s tools to better understand a patient’s controlled substance history. Downtime impacts patient care as healthcare providers work to make informed decisions about how to best care for patients.

Bamboo Health needed a proven process with minimal interruption to its customers and engaged AWS Enterprise Support to help. Working with their AWS technical account manager (TAM) and AWS solutions architect (SA), Bamboo Health planned blue/green upgrades where a replica (green) is created from the original (blue) instance. While the green environment is upgraded, the blue environment continues to serve requests. When the upgrade is complete, the application is cutover to the green environment. For more information, read the whitepaper Blue/Green Deployments on AWS.

Figure 1. The image shows a green database created as a replica of the blue database. The green database is used as a staging environment for changes. When they are ready, green is promoted to serve traffic.

Working closely with the AWS team, Bamboo Health performed a proof-of-concept (PoC) upgrade. Through the PoC, Bamboo’s technical teams showed that the blue/green strategy provided an upgrade path with reduced application downtime compared to native tools alone. Even the largest databases that previously required hours-long outage windows for in-place upgrades could now be cutover in minutes from blue to green environments. Bamboo Health then performed a pilot with a small number of production databases and repeated the process to complete the major version upgrade across the organization.

“With our new database maintenance strategy, we were able to manage these very large PSQL instances safely and with less engineering effort. Where before we had engineers up early in the morning performing vacuum and analyze operations and trying to avoid overrunning our windows, now we are successfully performing maintenance during business hours in a way that keeps our applications online and our customers happy,” said Owen Marshall, director of product platform at Bamboo Health.

The ability to prepare for an upgrade and then quickly execute the cutover allowed Bamboo Health’s team members to realize qualitative benefits as well. Because the cutover window was so short, it could often be performed during business hours. Even when it did require after-hours work, the window was shorter.

Bamboo Health worked with their AWS Enterprise Support Team to strategize their major version update resulting in a better upgrade experience for end customers and their own engineers. AWS provides the right services and enterprise support for their customers to achieve operational excellence. You can learn more about blue/green deployments in the Amazon RDS User Guide. Reach out to your account team to learn more about how AWS Enterprise Support can help you achieve your outcomes in the cloud.

For more information on how Bamboo Health helps improve patient outcomes and reduce overall healthcare costs, visit their homepage.