BioT

Setting Up a Smooth Software Delivery Pipeline for a Vital Healthcare Project

Creating solutions that truly make a difference is essential. When we talk about software development, the conversation often revolves around designing user experiences, selecting the right technology stack, finding talented engineers, and writing code. In other words, it’s all about transforming an idea into a functional piece of software. However, one crucial aspect often gets overlooked: deployment — the actual delivery of that software to its intended users. Without a solid deployment strategy in place, even the best ideas can fall flat because they never reach the market.

BioT, a pioneering startup from Israel, developed a powerful software solution designed to transform medical device clouds. To ensure seamless deployment and scalability, they partnered with Temy, whose expertise helped refine and execute a robust deployment strategy. This collaboration enabled BioT to bring its innovative solution to market efficiently, reaching HealthTech providers and patients with confidence.

A Provider of Infrastructure for medical device clouds

BioT is a cloud-based infrastructure for HealthTech companies, providing a secure, flexible, and interoperable platform for connected medical devices. By enabling seamless data collection, storage, and management in the AWS Cloud, BioT empowers medical device manufacturers to accelerate innovation while ensuring compliance and cybersecurity. The platform supports a wide range of use cases, including remote patient monitoring, AI-powered diagnostics, therapy management, device fleet management, and seamless EHR integration. With BioT, HealthTech companies can scale their digital health solutions efficiently, improve patient outcomes, and unlock new business models.

BioT was looking for reliable DevOps and QA engineers to create a robust pipeline for delivering BioT software to its users. Beyond our expertise, Temy stood out to the client with our streamlined process, which allows us to kickstart projects quickly. Here’s what one of the client’s stakeholders, Tal Yaniv, shared during his interview:

The project started in 2021 and has been progressing well ever since. Currently, we have three DevOps engineers and two QA experts on board, helping facilitiesBioT’s customers to fully leverage the benefits of the platform.

Optimizing Deployment and Streamlining QA Processes

Task 1: Automate the deployment of BioT instances

The client needed to streamline their user onboarding process to ensure a smooth first
deployment of BioT and enable future scalability. Optimizing this process was key to
accelerating market entry and setting the stage for nationwide expansion.

At first glance, BioT’s onboarding was straightforward: a user would create an AWS account, and the BioT support team would set up the software instance. The main issue was that the client’s team had to manually install and configure all the system components for each account.

For example, when launching Grafana (a system component intended for visualizing data retrieved from IoT devices), they had to set up data sources, passwords, plugins, and more — all by hand. And Grafana is just a small piece of the BioT puzzle.

You can imagine how tedious and error-prone this process could become, especially with the anticipated increase in the number of accounts. Moreover, since the system is consistently evolving, the BioT support team had to repeat this cumbersome process with every new version release for each account that requested the upgrade.

The issue was clear: we had to automate these deployments, eliminating any manual configurations.

Task 2: Automate version rollbacks

In addition to simplifying upgrades for each AWS account to newer versions of BioT, the client also asked us to ensure that rolling back to the previous version would be just as easy.

Task 3: Testing services

The BioT team also needed to establish a robust testing workflow to prevent bugs and inefficiencies from infiltrating the system with frequent updates.

Smooth Deployments and Rollbacks Along with an Enhanced QA Flow

We automated BioT’s software delivery pipelines using the following DevOps tools:

Jenkins. This is an automation server that orchestrates the entire process of testing and deploying a software instance.
Terraform. This tool automatically provisions servers, databases, networking resources, or other cloud infrastructure components needed for deploying a particular software instance.
Bash. This command-line tool automates various setup processes after the deployment.

This is what the deployment process looks like behind the scenes:

Step 1: The Jenkins pipeline
Jenkins is set up to monitor new deployment requests and starts a pipeline automatically. It retrieves the latest code and configuration files needed to deploy the BioT instance.

Step 2: The Terraform pipeline
Jenkins runs a command to initialize Terraform. Then, it triggers the execution of Terraform scripts to provision the necessary infrastructure. Once the infrastructure is ready, Jenkins proceeds with the BioT instance deployment.

Step 3: Bash scripts
After the deployment, Jenkins runs Bash scripts to automate system configuration tasks.

This setup works seamlessly for deploying the BioT platform for new users as well as upgrading existing users to new system versions.
In addition to automating system deployments, we’ve also streamlined rollbacks. The BioT support team can easily revert any software instance back to a previous version with all its configurations intact.

Rollbacks made easy

Achieving this involved using additional technologies. For instance, Elastic Beanstalk, an AWS solution for deploying and scaling web applications, makes it easier to roll back Grafana instances.
As our DevOps engineers focus on making the BioT platform easy to deploy, the QA team is collaborating with the client’s development team to ensure the platform works correctly (receives data from IoT devices, displays it correctly, shows it only to the intended users, etc.).

The QA process involves a mix of manual and automated tests conducted in a separate testing environment. The Temy team took charge of the manual testing, using simulators that mimic IoT devices sensing and transmitting patient data. This approach allows us to verify that the system works correctly without needing to involve real devices.

Fast and Flawless: From a Few Days to a Few Hours

The automated software delivery pipeline allowed the client to cut the deployment time for one BioT software instance from several days to just 2 to 3 hours. At the same time, the robust testing workflow powered by our QA team ensures that the software is bug-free.

This combination of speed and quality enabled the actual launch of the platform, allowing it to successfully deploy BioT instances. Today, BioT provides IoT visibility for dozens of medical organizations across the world.

Our partnership is ongoing as BioT evolves continuously. Whenever the development team rolls out new features and updates, the Temy team is right there to ensure everything runs smoothly and is deployed without any issues. Over the years, both teams have become a well-coordinated unit, working together to bring valuable improvements to the system BioT’s platform.

Frictionless Software Delivery as Key to User Satisfaction

This partnership is anything but a typical DevOps project. Since each user has their own software instance, it adds some extra challenges to the software delivery process. But Temy has tackled this head-on, making onboarding, updates, and rollbacks as easy as pushing a button.

Not only does automation speed up each deployment by reducing the need for manual intervention, but it also helps BioT ensure that its software is released reliably and stably. This leads to fewer errors and less downtime, improving the experience for end users.