Building a scalable platform for therapists

Before Microtica: long, manual deployments and slow development

The goal of Dr. Nature was simple: be the best appointment management software for therapists in Europe.

With a group of therapists with decades of combined therapist experience behind the Dr. Nature idea, the development team started creating the ultimate platform. However, with plans for expansion to France, Germany, and Austria, they had the need for a more scalable platform.

Handling a large number of patients together with their appointments and invoices was quite challenging. Manual deployments were taking too much time and development was going pretty slowly. All this was causing other development problems as well.

Coming across a solution: setting up the infrastructure and combining serverless using ready-made components

It started with setting up the infrastructure. For this, Dr. Nature needed Microtica’s ready-to-use components, which can be found directly in the portal. Microtica offers the following components:

• VPC
• MySQL 
• EKS
• DynamoDB 
• Redis
• S3

The Dr. Nature development team members were beginners in using AWS services, so instead, they chose to use the Microtica DynamoDB owned component, which made it very easy to set up their infrastructure. With only a few clicks in the Microtica UI, and they had a fully working and secure infrastructure in their AWS account.

They made great use of the Microtica owned DynamoDB and VPC component, creating for them as many scalable DB tables as they need, and a fully-fledged VPC without the hassle of setting it up. This saved them days of learning, creating, optimizing, and securing their own VPC.

Best of all, since this Microtica owned VPC component is freely available to all Microtica users, everyone can have these benefits.

To solve these challenges, the development team used serverless technology. Serverless computing means that the cloud provider runs the server instead of having to operate your own servers. The computer resource allocation is dynamically controlled.

This is exactly what the Dr. Nature team wanted, so combining serverless with Microtica’s DynamoDB component was the perfect option. Then, all that was left was a Lambda which will run their serverless code and an API Gateway so requests can be routed reliably. A perfect combination for a custom made Microtica component! Using the Microtica component generator, they quickly had the scaffolding and were able to build upon it immediately.

The platform consists of different components, including databases, invoice generator, user management, etc. Through a combination of Microtica’s ready-to-use components and a bunch of custom Microtica components later, they had a scalable platform architecture that can handle many many users.

The AWS services used in their Microtica components are:

• VPC
• API Gateway
• Lambda
• DynamoDB
• Cognito

As for environments, which, along with components, is one of Microtica’s core features, the Dr. Nature team set up three of them: test, dev, and production. The process goes like this: after we finish the development phase, we put the updates on the test environment to check if there are bugs, and then when everything is settled, we move live to production. This entire process lasts less than an hour.

One of the biggest benefits for the Dr. Nature team was that they could replicate these environments as many times as needed. As they release new features quite often, they need a dynamic and agile release process, which is what Microtica provided them.

Outcome: discovering the power of Microtica

Microtica accelerated the entire development, deployment, and testing processes.

As all actions are now automatic, the chances for errors are minimal. The Dr. Nature development team started using Microtica’s automation platform in days, with constant support from our development team.

Thanks to Microtica, Dr. Nature got a shorter go-to-market time. Now, when adding a new feature, they don’t have to spend hours deploying it. Instead, Microtica enables developers to add an update in just a few minutes.

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“Microtica enabled our scalable platform to grow painlessly. As we are constantly adding new products and serving new users, we need to be able to grow without any obstacles. Moreover, the development time was minimized, allowing us to set up the entire platform in just a few weeks. “

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Denis Vörös
‍CEO of Dr. Nature

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