Daisy Health Story
Daisy Health, a med-tech startup, used Ambassador’s Edge Stack API Gateway to address several critical challenges within their platform. The company required a secure, efficient way to manage API traffic that handled sensitive data, especially given their focus on healthcare services.
Results
Quicker Time to Market
Edge Stack streamlined Daisy Health's development process by integrating seamlessly with Kubernetes, enhancing security without additional workload, thereby accelerating time to market.
Improved Developer Experience
Daisy Health improved developer experience by using Edge Stack to simplify Kubernetes integration and automate security, boosting productivity. This allowed developers to focus more on creating features rather than handling infrastructure complexities.
Security Satisfaction
Daisy Health achieved security satisfaction with Edge Stack by implementing robust, automated security measures that ensured data protection without burdening developers, enabling them to focus on innovation safely
Background
San Diego-based Daisy Health is an innovative new telemedicine startup that focuses on marrying healthcare insurance brokers and their clients with Daisy Health’s unique marketplace services. The platform allows brokers to easily build proposals for additional healthcare services and allows their clients to seamlessly manage their employee rosters and payments electronically. It also enables clients to explore additional telehealthcare offerings and request new proposals for those services from their broker.
CTO Lou Sacco oversees a team of five developers, support staff, and QA personnel. The company's APIs, which handle susceptible data, required security and protection, and they were looking for an API gateway solution that would meet these stringent requirements. Ambassador’s Edge Stack API Gateway solved this challenge and seamlessly integrated their Kubernetes environment.
I'd like to think of Ambassador Edge Stack as one of the pillars of our platform. It just works. It's obviously fundamental because all our services are protected behind it, so that just has to work, and we have to trust that it does. This allows me to go off and work on other things, focusing on innovation.
Lou Sacco
CTO
The Challenges & Needs
Heightened Security Measures
Working in the healthcare space, where sensitive information is often shared between microservices, bolstered security. Lou had to ensure the platform’s APIs were protected very stringently. One requirement the team had was the need to separate traffic based on a path for a given service.
As an example, one of the functions of their platform called ‘Pic Service,’ manages the pictures that are displayed in their application as well as saving them or editing them. With functions for saving and editing operations, those couldn’t be public-facing, but features such as GET endpoints or viewing pictures could be public-facing. A gateway that could separate traffic based on internal vs external services was a must-have for their team.
“One of the nice things we like about Edge Stack is the ability to segment our traffic both externally and internally so that our core services were protected internally,” shared Lou.
Kubernetes-Native Requirements
Additionally, Lou’s team needed a solution that provided an easy Kubernetes integration. They were already utilizing the AWS Ingress Controller to manage traffic in and out of K8s, so having a gateway that was also K8s-friendly was a requirement. Initially, the team explored the AWS API Gateway since AWS was their main cloud provider, but they struggled to get the solution to meet their modern demands. One of Daisy Health’s partner companies, Rancher, ended up recommending Edge Stack as a Kubernetes-native alternative.
The Solution
Improved Time to Market
“Another big thing with Edge Stack was time to market for us. Being a small company, it's critical we can add enhanced features and meet the needs of our consumers quickly. With the stringent standards for security and application development, we need to be able to pull that forward as quickly as possible,” shared Lou.
By implementing Edge Stack, Lou’s development team noticed an accelerated time-to-market and a greater rapid ability to satisfy their customers’ needs without sacrificing security.
JWT Integration
“The perk for Edge Stack was the possible JWT integration with Cognito. Being able to propagate identity was key for us,” shared Lou.
With the Cognito integration to Edge Stack, the Daisy Health team could pass JWT tokens down to their service layer to propagate identities and know who was making calls to the gateway. Edge Stack and the JWT plugin made this possible.
Edge Stack has a wide array of integrations and plug-ins scenarios like the one Daisy Health needed possible. From observability standards to service meshes and progressive deployment tools to GitOps, Edge Stack’s flexibility helps enable a seamless experience for developers.
Ease of Use & Beyond
“Additionally, we were intrigued by Ambassador’s as an add-on, it’s definitely something that we'll continue to explore as we move forward,” shared Lou. “Also, just the ease of use of Edge Stack has been very helpful for us; honestly, it’s been pretty smooth sailing from here,” shared Lou.
Lou’s development team had multiple services that involved sending large XML data back and forth, and Edge Stack l was to handle that volume of data traffic. With Edge Stack's capabilities, they were able to easily configure timeouts and leverage a chatbot on their platform.
Another advantage for Daisy Health was its ability to take advantage of Telepresence, a local-to-remote development tool, within the Ambassador ecosystem. Both Kubernetes-native solutions, Edge Stack and Telepresence, work together to drive developer productivity. Telepresence allows developers to use the existing local development, build, and debug workflows, freeing up 50%+ of dev time from manual tasks to launch features and applications faster.
Results
While it’s still early days since implementing Edge Stack, Daisy Health has gained the benefits of decreased time-to-market, improved developer experience, and increased confidence in security compliance. We’re excited to share where they go from here!