Hybrid Cloud Journey using Amazon Outposts and AWS Local Zones

This article discusses athenahealth's journey to modernize their technology stack by leveraging AWS's hybrid cloud solutions, including AWS Outposts and AWS Local Zones. The main points covered are:

Specifically, the article covers:

• The need for modernization: athenahealth's legacy monolithic architecture faced scaling and operational challenges, prompting the move to the cloud and refactoring applications as microservices.
• Introducing AWS Outposts and AWS Local Zones: To address challenges in refactoring core services, athenahealth deployed AWS Outposts and Local Zones, enabling low-latency access to on-premises databases while running modernized code.
• Hybrid cloud architecture: athenahealth's architecture includes two geographically distributed data centers, each with two Outposts and two Local Zones, providing high availability and disaster recovery capabilities.
• Application deployment: Containerized workloads are deployed on Outposts and Local Zones using Amazon EKS, while non-latency-sensitive services run in AWS Regions.
• Primary use cases: Enabling microservices in AWS Regions to access on-premises databases, and offloading monolithic application features to Outposts and Local Zones.
• Conclusion: This transformation allows athenahealth to be more agile, efficient, and responsive to healthcare providers' and patients' evolving needs.