As we’ve seen in part 1, we started with AWS but soon realized that to be in accordance with the French law, we needed a certified cloud provider to store health data.
Following are the details of the serverless services that we use on both provider to deliver our application platform.
I’ll give you other third party PaaS providers also.
AWS
Cognito
We use Cognito for user account related stuff (sign-up/sign-in/authentication). Our main database hosted on Azure (see below) just holds the cognito identifiers, helping us to be conform to the General Data Protection Regulation.
Elastic Beanstalk
This PaaS component is used to host our Wrodpress based corporate website.
Simple Email Service
This component is used to send all of our email to our customers.
Route53
Route53 is used to get our prospects reach our corporate website.
Azure
Azure Database
We host our Health Data in a MySQL instance.
App Service
We use it to provide our web application and mobile REST API. This may have been left on AWS because there was no added value on Azure, except that having our API close to the data is the best thing to do for performance.
Storage Account
We store our mobile assets (mainly images, but also videos) on disk. Again, no added value compared to AWS except that being very close to our APIs.
DevOps
We’re mainly using two services of Azure DevOps:
- Azure Repos (Git)
- Azure Boards
CI/CD and Monitoring
Microsoft AppCenter for mobile applications (Android/iOS). “On push” build and delivery allows us to distribute our always improving apps to the Google and Apple stores several times a day if necessary. As soon as a commit is done on the linked Git repos, the new app will be available within minutes.
Others
We also use other PaaS services.
Twilio
Used for videoconferecing. We could have of course used a free alternative like Zoom, but we’re assured that the data collected by the service will remain private.
Stripe
Used for online payments and invoicing.
Costs
Now you may wonder about the cost of all of it. Well, we are on the beginning of our business adventure so it matters the most obviously.
I’m not going to give you great details about it. Know that it is around 300€ per month because we have very few customers right now.
As the platform will scale automatically to serve demand, we’ll reevaluate our choices very frequently.
Embracing the cloud 