Containers, Kubernetes Fuel Innovation in Medical Staffing
The shift to digital is critical for any industry, perhaps none more so than healthcare and the enterprises that serve it. And for the organizations that deliver applications that service essential frontline providers in a fast-changing world, an IT strategy based on containers and Kubernetes is increasingly becoming a game-changer.
For example, to manage staffing needs, hospitals rely on digital platforms and talent management tools. More and more, they’re looking to embrace a digital portal to reduce complexity and more easily access staff data like licenses and employment contracts. That’s critical as they look for people with the right skills for open positions.
Over the past two years, the pandemic has put even more pressure on healthcare institutions, which have faced persistent and major staff shortages. And the medical staffing industry — whether for temporary or permanent positions — is evolving its high-touch, concierge-style services to meet the needs of hospitals and medical professionals in the digital age. For innovative IT teams in the staffing industry, accelerating delivery of new applications means committing to a cloud native approach and standardizing on Kubernetes.
Portability = Prepped and Ready for the Future
Containers and Kubernetes are a much more mature technology now — easier to use, portable and therefore a great fit as needs evolve. For Utah-based CHG Healthcare, for example, that portability is an essential component of strategy as it builds out its suite of digital solutions for healthcare providers.
CHG helps healthcare institutions find the staff and expertise they need. It provides more than 30% of the temporary medical employees in the United States. Focusing on cloud native development enables it to take developer code deployed on AWS, make some tweaks and then apply it to Azure, GCP or even on-premises — wherever there is a need.
The CHG team’s focus on a DevOps approach and infrastructure as code using HashiCorp’s Terraform enables it to move quickly as it develops applications for business needs, speeding time to market. It started with AWS in the cloud, enabling flexible app deployment on the way to becoming multicloud.
Flexibility in the Storage Layer
A storage layer that is as flexible as any element in a cloud native stack is central to operating services and managing costs in the cloud. Optimizing and automating storage management provides many benefits, from faster software upgrades to the ability to quickly spin up new clusters.
While many organizations have reported cost-management issues around Kubernetes, citing difficulties allocating and overprovisioning resources, CHG is recouping as much as $5,000 a month after migrating its Kafka event-streaming data from a managed cloud service to Kubernetes using persistent storage from Portworx, for example.
And with backup and restoration a top concern, fully reducing risk when restoring critical application data means choosing a toolset with the flexibility to choose the right tool for the job in any environment, from Kubernetes to cloud or on-prem. CHG, for example, takes container snapshots to easily and confidently support migration.
A Foundation for Moving Forward
Reed Glauser, director of engineering at CHG, says that it is important for IT leaders building out an infrastructure to make sure their teams understand what’s been delivered so far. Sharing that understanding means others can subscribe to it and make contributions.
The beauty of cloud-based deployments and cloud native app development and infrastructure is that it is hugely flexible and hands the reins of control over to users. Cloud native technology allows the pace of innovation to accelerate because infrastructure gets out of the way. And automated app development and deployment scales on demand, allowing rapid growth of users and apps.
