A safe, reliable, online pharmacy
The Independent Pharmacy is an online pharmacy based in the UK, founded by Andy Boysan and Scott McDougall. Worried about the state of online healthcare in 2013, pharmacists Andy and Scott wanted to establish a reliable platform for buying essential medication. Today, they offer consultations, medication, and advice, registered with all relevant UK regulatory bodies, providing all the safety and reliability of buying from your local pharmacy.
The challenge: complexity
Originally built on another cloud provider, The Independent Pharmacy had migrated their core platform to AWS and adopted Kubernetes but were struggling with it: deploying software into production easily and safely was a challenge, as was understanding what was going on in the cluster, making it difficult to run a reliable service. Improving this was a priority, along with moving closer to alignment with the requirements of ISO 27001, a future goal.
During a Well-Architected review of the existing solution, we established that the Kubernetes platform provided more complexity than this workload needed today, and would be likely to need in future. We concluded that a simpler container based deployment model was a good fit. It was important to the customer stakeholders that their own team be able to own, understand, and operate the platform, something that was a challenge today.
The right solution fit: Amazon ECS on AWS Fargate
We recommended adopting AWS Fargate, deployed as part of our off-the-shelf Container Platform package, customised to fit the customer’s unique needs. AWS Fargate provides a serverless approach to running containers on AWS, removing operational complexities, and offering a simpler alternative to Kubernetes.
Our Container Platform delivers a CI/CD pipeline per application component based on GitHub Actions, supporting a blue/green deployment approach making it easy to check that a new software version will work before it’s rolled out for everyone.
The solution uses AWS CloudWatch to monitor the health and performance of the platform, providing the customer with visibility they didn’t previously have.
As part of this work, we also implemented our AWS Control Tower package, providing a best practices approach to the governance of their whole AWS platform, including pre-production, and per-developer sandbox accounts.
What The Independent Pharmacy said...
The Scale Factory have been extremely knowledgeable and helpful in totally transforming our AWS environment
Everyone there has been great to deal with, and has taken time to make sure they understand the needs of our business before implementing anything. They plan their work thoroughly and communicate well. We’ve been very happy.
The benefits
Today The Independent Pharmacy can operate their platform more easily, with the new simplified deployment solution giving them the confidence to release more frequently to production. They have a better understanding of what’s happening on their platform, thanks to an improved monitoring solution, and all of this costs less to run than the solution it replaced.
We continue to work with The Independent Pharmacy, providing support and additional consulting as required.
Founder Scott McDougall has been pleased with our work together: “The Scale Factory have been extremely knowledgeable and helpful in totally transforming our AWS environment,” he said. “Everyone there has been great to deal with, and has taken time to make sure they understand the needs of our business before implementing anything. They plan their work thoroughly and communicate well. We’ve been very happy.”
