docjo

01. challenges

In 2020, docjo was looking for a new technical partner, a company that could build and operate the infrastructure for the development and deployment of its apps and adapt this environment to new needs and projects. Due to the development of apps for the German market, there was one unavoidable requirement: “Among the most important requirements were GDPR compliance and location,” says Eitan Arat, CTO at docdok.health. Eitan leads the company’s digital infrastructure and the research and development team.

“We believe that every patient should have access to their doctor when they need it, and that medical professionals should be able to understand their patient’s health holistically, not just sporadically,” says Eitan, describing docjo’s vision. “Our mission is to redefine and improve doctor-patient communication through the combined use of real-world data analytics and telemedicine.” To achieve this, docjo enters into partnerships with top hospitals, medical associations and pharmaceutical and technology companies.

docjo was not just looking for an IaaS and SaaS provider, but for a close collaboration, “a partner who would act as part of our team to develop and maintain applications from the ground up.” Someone who is able to understand and accompany a technical development journey holistically. “After negotiating with several companies, we couldn’t find a solution that covered all our needs. Until we found NETWAYS, where we received good service and great cooperation from the very first call.”

02. solutions

A major advantage of NETWAYS Web Services is the high security standards, including GDPR compliance. All components of the NWS infrastructures run in two ISO 27001-certified data centers based in Nuremberg, Germany. Security cannot be valued highly enough – that is clear. But a secure infrastructure alone does not make a project a success.

“NETWAYS provided us with a great person called Gabriel, who very soon became our colleague in the team,” says Eitan. “Together we created all the prerequisites to build applications from scratch, including web and server CI/CD with monitoring.”

As a MyEngineer, Gabriel was in direct contact with docjo’s software developers from November 2020 and built CI/CD pipelines in GitLab for them according to their wishes and integrated these CI/CD pipelines with Kubernetes and OpenStack. Thanks to this integration, code changes can now be rolled out from GitLab across several test stages right through to production.

In the initial period, from November 2020 to January 2021, Gabriel, Eitan and his team were in particularly close contact. Daily video conferences with Jitsi and a Rocket.chat channel hosted by NWS facilitated collaboration. “This enabled us to move things forward quickly,” says Gabriel. docjo had a tight schedule, which is why NWS completely blocked Gabriel and released him for this one customer. “Their ideas were clear and structured,” he recalls. “They knew exactly what they wanted.” Within a few weeks, he set up an initial setup with GitLab as the central tool and automated many processes, integrated the JIRA ticketing system, wrote CI/CD jobs, built pipelines and gradually integrated tests.

Important aspects of the project were that pushing code in GitLab leads to new deployments in Kubernetes and that there is a secure connection between the Kubernetes clusters and a separate OpenStack project that contains additional resources. A Kubernetes cluster serves as a test environment from which a finished state is then deployed to the production environment, which runs in another Kubernetes cluster.

03. success

In total, docjo now has three independent setups running at NETWAYS Web Services, all of which follow the same scheme and rely on GitLab, Managed Kubernetes and NETWAYS Cloud Services based on OpenStack. Four joint projects, in which Eitan and his team built the backend servers and Gabriel designed the pipelines, have since been successfully implemented. This has resulted in various apps that are already live.

The developers at docjo can now work independently with their setups. If there are any problems, contact Gabriel at NWS, who will take a look and be happy to help.

“The collaboration brings great results thanks to the flexibility and willingness of both sides to learn and overcome obstacles along the way,” summarizes Eitan, CTO at docjo.

The aim of this project is to initiate change and create solutions that help patients and improve the digital healthcare world. But it’s also about: “What I like about my job is the challenge of building a team, achieving big goals and overcoming obstacles together,” says Eitan. “Also, creating products from scratch with NETWAYS has been a great and professional experience, which I find very enriching in my daily work. To see that our products are widely used and really help patients, and to have fun at the same time, that’s a success for me.”