Drop Bio Health uses Nitric to transform developer productivity and deliver business value quickly.

Drop Bio Health is an Australian at-home health technology company whose WellBeing test helps you detect, track and reverse health trends over time using blood biomarkers and personalized lifestyle analysis.

With a small development team who also handle ops responsibilities, they need to focus as much as possible on maintaining data security, adding customer value and delivering quickly.

Challenge

The complexity of cloud development introduced business risk and kept the Drop Bio Health team from shipping innovations as quickly as they wanted.

• With a complex architecture, the team was dependent on a key team member to run deployments, and the small team felt overloaded with DevOps work rather than focusing on their business domain.
• Hiring a DevOps engineer would limit the versatility of the small team, given the high variety of work required, without addressing the key person risk.
• Manual deployment and testing steps limited the team to one safe production release per day. They wanted to be able to deploy on demand, even multiple times per day, with little or no manual steps.
• The team had to maintain two projects, their core business product as well as the project that handled cloud deployments, built with a combination of Terraform and AWS CDK.
• Choosing solutions that would allow them to ship quickly set them up for scaling challenges and much higher cloud costs.

Drop Bio Health ships faster at lower cost with Nitric

Drop Bio Health chose Nitric in order to help their dev team stay focused on development, rather than infrastructure, while taking advantage of cloud benefits.

Their WellBeing application was written in Koa and had been through several evolutions. In migrating to Nitric, the team was able to implement fine grained security scopes and leverage cloud resources such as Schedules and Topics. This enabled moving from a full-time hosted pg-boss solution to a scale-to-zero solution with asynchronous workers – avoiding cost during unneeded hours. Additionally, they were able to leverage the power of API Gateway to enhance their security by blocking unauthorized requests.

Because Nitric makes it easy to take advantage of cloud-native resources and was built with the developer experience in mind, the migration took only a matter of weeks rather than months, and has given the Drop Bio Health team the capability of deploying automatically on-demand. Clean deploys to their environment take around 20 minutes, with updates needing only 5 minutes to deploy.

With Nitric, the Drop Bio Health team can:

• Take advantage of correctly configured cloud resources like API Gateways, Schedules, Topics & Events and their built-in scalability and security, without the complexity of configuring or troubleshooting those resources.
• Define cloud resources directly in their application to avoid infrastructure drift and other challenges involved with working with Terraform and other IaC tools.
• Realize the benefits of serverless, including scale-to-zero hosting for when traffic is low.
• Fully simulate the cloud environment and easily debug during local development, to keep moving fast with their day-to-day work.
• Reduce the burden on team members with complex cloud and deployment expertise.

The results

Implementing Nitric has enabled Drop Bio Health to use developers’ time more efficiently, build and ship more customer value, and take advantage of cloud and serverless benefits.

• 30% headcount increase saved - devs are able to focus more on core application features instead of spending time developing and maintaining deployment automation scripts, and hiring dedicated DevOps support is no longer needed.
• 60% reduction in AWS hosting costs - all compute resources were moved to scale-to-zero serverless hosting, cutting cloud hosting costs to serverless hosting, cutting cloud hosting costs from previous levels.
• Deployment frequency increased by 12X - the Nitric framework takes care of provisioning and configuring infrastructure (more than 500 cloud resources for the WellBeing application) so that deployments can be automated and high-confidence.
• The WellBeing application benefits from the performance, scalability, and security of cloud-native resources.
• The whole dev team is more productive, spending their day delivering business outcomes instead of debugging runtime environment challenges.