.NET Microservices Migration Initiative with Azure | Keyhole Software

Keyhole consultants were brought in over a multi-year period to assist Northwell Health with a large-scale modernization and migration to the cloud using Azure. Northwell Health is New York State’s largest healthcare provider. This initiative is one of many Keyhole has worked with the organization to complete.

Technology Overview

The Keyhole team worked to help Northwell migrate pre-existing, critical .NET 4.5 applications to the cloud using Azure. The team analyzed and planned so that the migration would meet security and performance requirements.

Originally, the plan was to have the existing .NET Framework 4.5 applications migrated over to be hosted on Azure. However, because of Keyhole’s experience and expertise with the systems, the plan was revised.

Instead of lifting and shifting the existing applications, Keyhole consultants created totally new, cloud-native applications to supplement and replace the functionality of the existing “on-premise” applications. Akin to how microservices is the approach to break up a monolith, the team created creating four “micro apps” on Azure to serve the four business units that used functionality in the on-premise applications.

The main technologies leveraged to create these cloud-native micro-apps were Application Gateway, Container Registry and Container Instances, Web Apps, Cosmos DB, Key Vaults, Storage Accounts, and Logic Apps.

Project Results

Eventually, the team reached the point where all of the core functionality provided by the on-premise application could be done with the applications the team built in the cloud. At that point, Northwell was able to completely turn off the on-premise application.

This approach checked all the boxes for both the technical teams as well as business partners. As shown in previous engagements, Northwell Health continues to engage with Keyhole Software experts to manage this technology transition.