NMDP believes each of us holds the key to curing blood cancers and disorders. As a global nonprofit leader in cell therapy, NMDP creates essential connections between researchers and supporters to inspire action and accelerate innovation to find life-saving cures. With the help of blood stem cell donors from the world’s most diverse registry and its extensive network of transplant partners, physicians and caregivers, NMDP is expanding access to treatment so that every patient can receive life-saving cell therapy. NMDP. Find cures. Save lives.
At-a-Glance
To help deliver life-saving digital services to patients with blood cancer and other disorders, NMDP (formerly known as the National Marrow Donor Program and Be The Match) has transformed its IT infrastructure. By moving to a modern CI/CD pipeline built on Kubernetes and Rancher, NMDP has significantly reduced operational costs, streamlined development processes and boosted availability — contributing to more than 20,000 lives impacted since it deployed SUSE solutions.
NMDP Accelerates Healthcare IT with Rancher and Kubernetes on AWS
“By moving to Amazon EKS with Rancher, Kubernetes takes care of high availability with far fewer nodes. This saved us over 50% on our AWS costs, freeing up money to be spent elsewhere toward our mission.”
The journey to containers
To advance its unique mission, NMDP depends on its digital systems. As well as its database of stem-cell donors, the company operates systems for medical research, clinical trial management and more.
NMDP developed most of its applications in-house. The company’s developers were quick to recognize that moving to a containerized architecture would offer significant advantages around efficiency, agility and speed to market. By 2020, NMDP was deploying nearly all of its applications on Docker.
While the move to containers unlocked new benefits, it also brought challenges. Over time, the number of deployments grew, resulting in hundreds of on-premises Linux virtual machines (VMs) and AWS EC2 instances running Docker-based applications. A Docker swarm-based solution was implemented but could not scale to meet the organization’s needs. This large and varied footprint significantly increased the complexity of container management, maintenance and security.
A big challenge was that there were many different ways for developers to deploy NMDP’s Docker-based applications.
“We wanted to reduce our server sprawl, standardize, and simplify our infrastructure and deployment processes for our developers,” says Ryan Anderson, senior DevOps engineer at NMDP. “After observing companies successfully implement Kubernetes to solve our same problems, we decided to standardize on it. This led to the question: Which Kubernetes?”
NMDP then laid out a number of key criteria, including the ability to deploy containerized applications on-premises and on AWS. Crucially, it wanted support for Microsoft Active Directory authentication so that NMDP could deliver role-based access for its teams.
Why Rancher?
After narrowing its search to a shortlist of three leading Kubernetes platforms, NMDP selected Rancher to deliver simple and consistent cluster management.
Rancher addressed all of NMDP’s core technical and operational requirements. In particular, the company greatly appreciates the ability to manage its on-premises and cloud Kubernetes clusters from a single point of control, and to provide a standard process for deploying containerized applications regardless of whether the target platform is on the cloud or in an on-premises data center.
Rancher delivers robust RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) capabilities right out of the box, ensuring seamless integration with existing directory services and providing secure, granular access control for teams. This would allow NMDP to authenticate and set permissions with Microsoft Active Directory, thereby protecting sensitive health care data at all times.
Enterprise support from SUSE was an equally important decision point. With Rancher, NMDP gets regular updates and new functionality along with responsive support from expert SUSE developers.
“During our evaluation, Rancher emerged as the clear winner,” says Anderson. “The SUSE solution met and exceeded our requirements in some key areas. For example, all solutions supported Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service [EKS] clusters, but only Rancher had a Terraform provider, which greatly simplified deploying new clusters and fit into our existing workflows.”
With Rancher, NMDP has a common platform to deploy and manage Kubernetes environments on-premises or in the AWS cloud. Anderson comments: “We can switch applications between our cloud and on-premises infrastructure with very little work. By adopting Kubernetes and standardizing our Docker application deployments to it, our developers worry less about the infrastructure so that they can focus on their applications.”
NMDP quickly deployed and configured Rancher, enabling it to abstract away the complexity of Kubernetes cluster management. The solution was straightforward to deploy, as Anderson notes: “Unlike other solutions we considered, we didn’t need an army of consultants to implement Rancher.”
The impact of Rancher
Accelerates provisioning
Rancher has transformed NMDP’s approach to cluster management. Today, NMDP leverages RKE2 to deploy and manage its on-premises clusters. In addition, it uses the Terraform Provider Rancher v2 as part of its IaC (Infrastructure as Code) workflow for AWS EKS.
This new approach offers significant advantages. Previously, deploying an application required developers to request a new server, wait for the server to be provisioned, and then manually configure load balancing and other key capabilities. Today, these process steps are automated, which significantly reduces developer workload. And because cloud and on-premises deployments are now practically identical, the company can re-platform applications rapidly.
“We’re using the same tools and the templates on-premises and in the cloud, which gives us flexibility around where our applications are deployed,” says Anderson.
Saves over 50% of AWS costs
Deploying Kubernetes clusters to Amazon EKS — deployed and managed with Rancher — has delivered significant AWS cost-efficiencies for NMDP.
“Previously, we used Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk service to deploy Docker applications in AWS,” says Anderson. “To achieve high availability, each application needed multiple EC2 instances, leading to a significant number of instances and high costs. By moving to Amazon EKS with Rancher, Kubernetes takes care of high availability with far fewer nodes. This saved us over 50% on our AWS costs, freeing up money to be spent elsewhere toward our mission.”
In addition, savings occurred in its on-premises infrastructure from realizing a 60% reduction of on-premises Docker VMs by migrating those applications to Kubernetes clusters.
Strengthens availability and recovery
With high-availability capabilities from Rancher and Kubernetes, NMDP is boosting uptime for its mission-critical applications and strengthening its disaster recovery capabilities.
“SUSE solutions have transformed our organization: we are now a Kubernetes-first business, and our most important applications are on Rancher,” says Anderson. “Our developers have a common process to deploy applications to a standards-based infrastructure. Rancher provides a stable platform with incredible uptime that supports NMDP’s life-saving mission.”
Creates a shared CI/CD pipeline
Using Rancher, NMDP has created a common deployment pipeline for all clusters, irrespective of the deployment platform. NMDP’s continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) solution integrates easily with Rancher and Kubernetes, giving developers the ability to test and redeploy code more frequently.
“Before Kubernetes and Rancher, much of our infrastructure involved manual processes,” says Anderson. “Today with Kubernetes, everything is code and everything is consistent. Leveraging industry-standard tools and deploying infrastructure and applications in the same way — whether on-premises or on AWS — has been a real gamechanger for us. We’re able to help our developers be more productive and better support NMDP’s mission.”
What’s next for NMDP?
NMDP aims to support its life-saving mission by embracing GitOps technology to enhance developer collaboration, productivity and speed to market. The successful implementation is allowing the company to benefit from these new Kubernetes tools widely used in the open source community. NMDP can pursue its strategy on an open platform — eliminating the need for complex customizations or proprietary add-ons.
“Since we started our work with SUSE, our Rancher solution has made an important contribution to more than 20,000 lives impacted,” concludes Anderson. “Our SUSE solutions will continue to play a key role in the years ahead.”