Case Study
Rails Consulting
Architecture and performance counsel for a clinical-genetics SaaS
The company
A Seattle clinical-genetics company building a genomics decision-support system — the kind of product that puts pharmacogenomic and genetic-risk information in front of physicians, inside the clinical workflow. The architecture was a Ruby on Rails front end talking to RESTful Java web services, with MongoDB behind it, running on AWS. Regulated healthcare data, so HIPAA was part of the picture from the start.
What I did
The first round was Rails best-practice and performance counsel for the external-facing product. The substantive questions were the ones you'd expect from a team getting ready to scale: which deployment platform, which web and app server, how to handle logging without letting the log collections eat the database. I worked through the MongoDB side in some detail — capped collections (and a then-current index bug worth knowing about), TTL indices, and archive-and-purge scripting to keep the hot collections small and fast.
Outcome
Architecture was successfully implemented – the custom details we worked together sailed exactly as planned, and the app deployed to great success.