Ecare is an innovative IT company from Enschede, the Netherlands. That was founded in 2007, with the development of a software solution for healthcare companies. A system that empowered the caregivers to fully focus on providing care. Since then Ecare has grown to become a serious player in the market, with their smart en simple SaaS-solutions for all kinds of care institutions.
PUUR.
One of their SaaS-applications is ‘PUUR.’. This is a simple, clear and user-friendly filing system for healthcare organizations. In which the caregiver has an overview of his or her daily work. In addition, it offers features to do assessments, write reports and safely share information with clients and other caregivers.
Technical Lead Leon van der Riet explains: “This filing system was originally built on a monolithic architecture. In which the user interface, the functionality, the processing and storage of the data, were combined in one data model.”
Challenges
At first this data model functioned properly. But as the number of customers started to grow rapidly, the first challenges arose. The monolith was not as scalable, as was desired by the performance. At the same time, new customers arrived, with specific functional requirements. These requests were often added to the application, without having a functional assurance.
“It became harder to manage”, explains Leon. “Pieces of the code were not cleaned up. And the names were not always unambiguous. That caused various processes to overperform. With double costs, performance challenges and complexity as a result.”
Microservices
To increase the flexibility and scalability of the applications, Ecare decided to implement a microservices architecture. In which different components of the application use the same services. A challenging migration. Ecare decided that they could use some help with this. Leon: “We were looking for an organization that could peer review our code. As well as advise us on things like scalability, governance and how to get the most out of Azure. ”
Big step forward
“Microsoft introduced us to Intercept. They helped us straighten out the code. Intercept also advised us to move our largest customer, for whom we were still using a physical data center, to Azure. This enabled us to phase out our data center. That is a big step in the right direction for us. As a result, we no longer have to invest in maintaining two systems that serve the same purpose, ”says Leon.