Modernizing life-saving workloads with AWS serverless

This article chronicles the National Marrow Donor Program's decade-long modernization of HapLogic, their bone marrow matching system, from on-premises infrastructure to AWS serverless architecture.

• NMDP operates 41 million donor registry, impacting 7,435 lives in 2023
• HapLogic performs embarrassingly parallel matching computations in seconds
• 2014: Refactored to Scala/Spark, reducing license costs but requiring 312 hosts
• 2015: Rehosted to AWS with blue-green deployment strategy, reducing release cycles
• 2024: Modernized to serverless using Lambda, Aurora, and Step Functions
• Achieved over $1 million in cost savings since production launch
• Optimized Lambda cold starts and memory footprints through code simplification
• Modernization required cross-functional alignment: business, security, operations, testing, finance
• Finance teams must adapt to cloud's pay-per-use model and manage "Free Capacity Effect"

NMDP demonstrates successful legacy system modernization through incremental steps, disciplined innovation, and whole-organization engagement while maintaining reliability for life-saving healthcare applications.