HealthTech startup scales from a single VPS to a production-grade Azure platform in 9 weeks
A growing digital health startup with 8,000 active patients was crashing daily at peak hours. We rebuilt their infrastructure on Azure — achieving 99.97% uptime and 7-minute deployments.
The Challenge
Our client's patient-facing mobile app had outgrown its single €50/month VPS. Manual FTP deployments took 4 hours, the server crashed every morning during peak usage, and there was no RGPD-compliant data architecture. With a Series A round closing and 8,000 active patients on the platform, this was urgent.
- Single-server architecture with no redundancy or auto-scaling
- App crashing daily between 08:00–09:00 due to traffic spikes
- Manual FTP deployments averaging 4 hours each
- No monitoring, alerting, or incident response process
- No RGPD-compliant data architecture for patient health records
- Zero secrets management — credentials stored in plain-text config files
Our Solution
Architecture Design & Security Review
Designed a RGPD-compliant reference architecture on Azure, including data residency (EU regions only), encryption at rest and in transit, and a secrets management strategy using Azure Key Vault.
Container & Kubernetes Migration
Containerised all application services with Docker and deployed to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with Horizontal Pod Autoscaler — allowing the cluster to scale automatically during peak hours.
Database Migration
Migrated from a self-managed PostgreSQL instance to Azure Database for PostgreSQL Flexible Server with geo-redundant backups, point-in-time recovery, and private endpoint access.
CI/CD Pipeline
Built Azure DevOps pipelines for automated testing, container image building, and blue-green deployments to AKS. Deployment time reduced from 4 hours to 7 minutes.
Monitoring & Alerting
Deployed Log Analytics Workspace + Application Insights for full observability: request tracing, exception tracking, and PagerDuty-integrated alerting for critical incidents.
Results
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