Scaling for Growth as a Tech Firm

Darin Moore, our VP of DevOps at Arter, shares thoughts on how why it is critical to design and build our infrastructure that will help Artera scale for growth as a tech firm. This is originally published in an article by Built In LA written by Built In Staff, and we are only sharing the section specifically written by Darin Moore. You can refer to the full article here for thought leadership from other technology leaders.

Artera delivers a platform-level patient communications solution that integrates across a health system’s tech stack.

Describe what scalability means to you. Why is scalability important for the technology you’re building?

Scalability in the context of Artera’s platform is the ability of our application and infrastructure to handle an increasing amount of work, a need for resources or growth in users — without a significant decrease in performance — efficiency or functionality. It is a fundamental concept in our technology because it ensures that we can adapt and grow to meet evolving demands and challenges.

Scalability is critical for what we are building as it directly impacts our ability to deliver a reliable and effective patient experience while accommodating changes in usage patterns, data volumes and complexity.

There are a few key reasons why it’s important. One is to meet user demands. As our customer base grows, scalability ensures that we can handle increased traffic and user interactions without slowdowns or outages. This is especially important for online services and applications.

Another is to handle increased data. Our platform receives, generates and processes vast amounts of data in databases, advanced data analytics and AI models. Scalability allows these systems to process and store more data as needed without sacrificing performance.

Also, it helps us adapt to workload peaks. Scalability ensures that our platform can handle spikes in usage throughout the day. Without having this capability, our system may struggle to maintain performance during these peak periods or waste resources during low volume periods.

How do you build this tech with scalability in mind?

Artera has a talented team of DevOps and software engineers who have a fundamental understanding of the scalability needs of our organization. As new services and features are designed the need for the application to be scalable and resilient are core requirements. The solutions we design and build use modern containerized tooling with significant automation included to handle the scaling and failover needs of our platform.

What tools or technologies does your team use to support scalability, and why?

Artera is primarily using AWS cloud technologies with Kubernetes as the key underlying platform. The flexibility of our EKS and virtualized Kubernetes clusters have been a key part of our current scalability. Of course, there are a lot of secondary technologies that also require some support from the team. At the end of the day our team uses technology that helps us future-proof our platform by allowing us to incorporate new features, components and technologies with small, frequent deployments while continuing to scale rapidly so that we can respond quickly to market changes and customer needs.

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