Case Study

CompuGroup Medical South Africa (CGMSA)
drives healthcare innovation
with Kubernetes and DeARX iPaaS

Spectro Cloud

WSO2

Kubernetes

With a rich history spanning decades, healthcare technology provider CompuGroup Medical South Africa (CGMSA) has become synonymous with cutting-edge solutions that elevate the healthcare sector. To help it take the next step on its cloud-native journey, CGMSA turns to DeARX’s managed Kubernetes integration service, iPaaS.

Technology innovation for better patient outcomes

CGMSA is on a mission to enrich South African healthcare through a comprehensive technology ecosystem, seamlessly integrating electronic health records (EHR), practice management, telehealth, and medical billing solutions.

This integration streamlines workflows, enhances patient care, and empowers healthcare professionals.

Building robust integrations on WSO2

VP for Development and Research at CGMSA, André Frylinck explains:

“ As an integrator of healthcare services, strongly driven by data and medical transactions, CGMSA is dependent on its integration and Identity & Access Management (IAM) stack. For that we leverage the leading suite of products provided by open-source provider WSO2. ”

Identity Server from WSO2 is a feature-rich Identity and Access Management product, which has fortified CGMSA’s security infrastructure providing the business and its customers with frictionless, secure and privacy-enabled access. Security is enhanced by Identity Server’s intelligent and scalable protection provided to APIs.

WSO2’s API Management product provides CGMSA with a feature-rich capability to design, develop, secure, deploy, publish, manage and maintain their APIs thereby benefiting internal product teams, partners and consumers in the evolving digital services community.

Beyond the API Manager product, CGMSA has also leveraged WSO2’s Micro Integrator to manage several mediations and transformations required by its partners.

Prime time to transform for the future

“To remain at the forefront of our industry and benefit from the newest technology
innovations, CGMSA is always looking to invest in its integration stack” continues Frylinck.

“The need to move quickly, combined with the market’s need for flexibility, have combined perfectly with the capabilities of Kubernetes and the broader cloud-native technologies available today,” says Frylinck. “At CGMSA we’ve taken advantage of this, starting with our WSO2 integration and IAM stack.”

“We matured our implementation of WSO2 over a period of three years. Now, together with DeARX, we are transforming our infrastructure into the cloud-native landscape — a transformation that has already shown benefits and is paving the way for our future modular architecture.”

A seamless transition to Kubernetes

“The transition from traditional virtual machines (VMs) to Kubernetes was a significant milestone in CGMSA’s cloud-native journey. This transformation, facilitated by Palette from Spectro Cloud and DeARX’s engineered Helm charts, streamlined the migration process, enabling CGMSA to transition its entire integration landscape into Kubernetes in just two months,” adds Vernon Osborne, Platform Architect at DeARX.

iPaaS is DeARX’s integration platform as a service, a new innovation that packages integration software from global open-source leader WSO2 into a managed Kubernetes service, powered by Spectro Cloud’s Palette platform. iPaaS also leverages cloud native observability tooling, such as Prometheus and Grafana, all wrapped in DeARX’s trusted expert services and support.

DeARX engineered iPaaS to give customers like CGMSA a range of compelling benefits:

  • Higher availability through fast scaling and automatic recovery
  • Rapid, consistent and reliable deployments that are standardised, automated and reproducible
  • Lower overall hardware costs and better system performance through standard deployment patterns and optimised compute resource management
  • Reduced downtime and business risk through improved observability and rolling cluster patching Adaptability to fluctuating business demand
    through rapid and automated resource scaling

 

A seamless transition to Kubernetes

“ The transition from traditional virtual machines (VMs) to Kubernetes was a significant milestone in CGMSA’s cloud-native journey. This transformation, facilitated by Palette from Spectro Cloud and DeARX’s engineered Helm charts, streamlined the migration process, enabling CGMSA to transition its entire integration landscape into Kubernetes in just two months, ”

Vernon Osbourne

Platform Architect at DeARX

iPaaS is DeARX’s integration platform as a service, a new innovation that packages integration software from global open-source leader WSO2 into a managed Kubernetes service, powered by Spectro Cloud’s Palette platform. iPaaS also leverages cloud native observability tooling, such as Prometheus and Grafana, all wrapped in DeARX’s trusted expert services and support.

DeARX engineered iPaaS to give customers like CGMSA a range of compelling benefits:

  • Higher availability through fast scaling and automatic recovery
  • Rapid, consistent and reliable deployments that are standardised, automated and reproducible
  • Lower overall hardware costs and better system performance through standard deployment patterns and optimised compute resource management
  • Reduced downtime and business risk through improved observability and rolling cluster patching Adaptability to fluctuating business demand
    through rapid and automated resource scaling

“ At DeARX we’ve been running integration workloads in Kubernetes for about four years, but it was time to take that to the next level. Standing up a cluster and running a few workloads for a customer is not the real challenge; to fully benefit from modern tooling the value lies in areas such as Day-2 operations; managing hybrid environments across on-prem, edge and bare-metal; immutability; standards and controls; and management at scale.”

“To do all this you need a well-engineered solution and advanced tooling — which is what we get from Spectro Cloud, and why we built our iPaaS offer on its Palette platform.”

Figure 1, below, shows the modeled ‘full stack’ for the iPaaS deployment, as defined and assembled using Spectro Cloud Palette.

Figure 1 – CGMSA Integration Cluster, Layered Pack View

A rapid path to results

From an architectural perspective, the initial deployment of DeARX iPaaS for CGMSA started with a multi-availability zoned production cluster, plus a non-production cluster and an observability cluster, as shown in Figure 2, below.

From an implementation perspective the CGMSA team merged with the DeARX team in a truly seamless model of execution.

Operating in a shared MS Teams environment with clear roles, and leveraging all the pre-engineered artefacts, made the project a really smooth process.

Key results

  • Reduced VM footprint
  • Observability tooling highlights further opportunity for footprint reduction
  • Rapid patching with zero downtime already realised
  • Peace of mind from improved security and resiliency

Figure 2

“Having a designated Spectro Cloud architect to validate and review our designs and artefacts was extremely helpful and they are a true extension of our partnership into the customer,” says DeARX’s Osborne. “The results have been immediate,” says CGMSA’s Frylinck. “Already we have been able to respond rapidly to new security vulnerabilities. We have clear visibility of the cluster usage across all workloads, enabling us to optimise our deployments. “And our plans to upgrade to the latest patched versions of WSO2 are now managed as a relatively simple operational task by the DeARX team.

“That’s just the start of the journey, but it has already proven the value of iPaaS,” Frylinck continues. “Now we are well positioned for our future modular architecture where these design patterns and technologies can be leveraged. We are now ready to open up the speed and flexibility benefits of this containerised architecture to our developers, which will truly unlock even more value for our business!”