Availity accelerates migrations to Amazon EKS with Experience-Based Acceleration (EBA)

Introduction

As healthcare technology keeps evolving, leading organizations are embracing cloud-native solutions to enhance their operational capabilities. In this post, we’ll explore how Availity, America’s largest real-time healthcare information network, leveraged a three-day Experience-Based Acceleration (EBA) workshop to accelerate the migration of 13 critical workloads to AWS. Four AWS services were the focus of this workshop, Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), AWS Database Migration Service (DMS), and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Availity’s successful EBA workshop, innovative leadership, and deep technical expertise accelerated cloud migration and strengthened workforce technical capabilities, solidifying their position as a healthcare technology leader.

The Challenge

In 2024, Availity started one of its most ambitious technology transformations: migrating their critical clearinghouse platform to Amazon Web Services (AWS) as part of their data center exit. This complex ecosystem, comprising over 80 interconnected applications built on diverse technologies, forms a complex Information Technology landscape which processes over 13 billion healthcare transactions annually for over 3.4 million providers, 17,000 connected Business-to-Business (B2B) partners, and over 95 percent of payers nationwide. The challenge was to migrate quickly without disrupting operations.

The scale and complexity of the migration presented unique challenges, despite Availity’s innovative leadership and strong AWS expertise. Teams across the enterprise had varying levels of cloud migration experience. Complex workflows between teams often required multiple handoffs and offline coordination, creating bottlenecks that impacted the migration progress. Further, balancing ongoing product development with migration activities created resource allocation challenges.

Strategic Approach

While Availity’s culture of innovation and technical excellence positioned them well to tackle this transformative initiative, Availity and AWS formed a strategic partnership leveraging EBA to unify and upskill teams through hands-on, collaborative delivery. This approach facilitated the migration of these workloads and to build lasting capabilities within Availity’s teams. The cornerstone of this strategy was a three-day intensive EBA migration party held in Jacksonville, FL, which brought together over 80 participants from both organizations to tackle this ambitious transformation.

The approach centered on three key focus areas that drove both immediate results and long-term success. First, the team identified 13 critical applications for immediate migration, chosen strategically for their potential to serve as templates for future migrations. Second, recognizing the varying levels of cloud expertise across teams, the EBA provided hands-on migration experience to team members, bridging skill gaps and fostering knowledge sharing. Third, through AWS-led break-out sessions, the initiative also focused on identifying opportunities to enhance Availity’s cloud platform.

This comprehensive approach aligned perfectly with Availity’s culture of innovation and technical excellence. It empowered them to progress their ambitious data center exit timeline while building internal capabilities for long-term success in the cloud.

What is an EBA?

An EBA helps customers achieve their cloud goals (business value on AWS) using an agile, hands-on, immersive methodology.

• For leaders: An EBA cloud value (migrations/modernizations) by aligning stakeholders and teams through decision making and measurable business outcomes.
• For organizations: An EBA unlocks organizational capability. An EBA across teams and creates a unified approach to problem solving.
• For builders: An EBA empowers builders/engineers/architects with the skills needed to achieve months of work in days during the EBA. Builders get undivided attention to achieve results for the organization.

EBA – Driving Excellence Forward

Based on our experience working with a large number of enterprises, successful migrations and EBA initiatives rely heavily on critical factors, which are highlighted in the illustration below.

Figure 1 – The ingredients for successful EBA

All these factors were exemplified in Availity’s approach, including:

• Sponsorship by senior leadership to validate the goal is significant to the business and that it is a focused activity for the duration of the EBA.
• Rapid Decision Making: While some decisions are not easily reversible (what we call ‘one-way doors’ at Amazon), others are ‘two-way doors’, meaning they are reversible and can be adjusted quickly.
• Leadership empowered their teams to focus on the goal and dedicate time to it, minimizing interruptions from day-to-day operations.

Architecture – Diagram/Pattern

AWS and Availity teams collaborated to migrate on-premises containerized workloads from OpenShift to Amazon EKS successfully. The migration architecture established a robust foundation with a VPC structure dedicated to customer workloads distributed strategically across three availability zones. Each availability zone contained EC2 instances to maximize resilience and uptime ensuring business continuity throughout the transition. Availity leveraged Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR) to store container images.

The migration validated Availity’s architecture patterns, leveraging proven methodologies and best practices developed through extensive AWS expertise. AWS specialists worked closely with Availity’s migration teams throughout the process, providing guidance on architectural decisions and implementation strategies. This collaborative approach shortened the transition timeline while ensuring the migrated environment maintained high availability, scalability, and operational excellence in the cloud environment. The diagram below demonstrates the migration pattern leveraged during this EBA.

 Figure 2 – Migration pattern used during this EBA

 Key Achievements

This EBA initiative delivered remarkable outcomes that far exceeded traditional migration metrics. Following four weeks of meticulous preparation, the Availity team executed an intensive three-day EBA delivery with outstanding results. During this short timeframe, the team successfully migrated 13 critical applications to AWS environments. The initiative’s success was reflected in its impressive 4.9 out of 5 Customer Satisfaction Score, with over 40 EBA goals achieved. Most notably, over 70 Availity team members across 10 teams gained hands-on migration experience, creating a strong foundation of cloud expertise that will underpin future migrations.

Through three AWS-led break-out sessions, the teams identified 11 platform improvement opportunities, focusing on EKS platform enhancements, operational efficiency, and automation via Amazon EKS Karpenter and Automode. The engagement also highlighted cost optimization opportunities through right-sizing clusters and instances and adopting purpose-built databases. The EBA also established repeatable migration patterns that Availity is now leveraging across their entire migration portfolio, optimizing future migrations and creating a scalable framework for ongoing cloud adoption.

These improvements, built upon Availity’s strong AWS Cloud foundation, position the company to deliver even greater value to their healthcare customers and reinforce its leadership in the healthcare information technology sector.

Leadership Perspective

The initiative’s success resonated strongly at the executive level, where leaders recognized both its immediate impact and long-term strategic value. Michael Privat, Availity’s Chief Data & Engineering Officer, captured the initiative’s transformative nature: “This was truly a great success for us. Everyone left feeling like they accomplished big things and, most importantly, they left knowing how to do the things they still need to do.” This emphasis on both achieving immediate migration goals and further enhancing capabilities aligned perfectly with Availity’s culture of innovation and technical excellence, positioning the company for continued leadership in the healthcare technology sector.

Brandi Booze, Sr. Manager, Program Management and EBA lead at Availity, also stated: “The atmosphere throughout the EBA was energizing. Cross-functional collaboration, in-depth technical guidance, and a shared sense of purpose led to breakthrough moments for many teams. This wasn’t just a technical workshop – it was a catalyst for momentum in our cloud strategy.”

The executive team’s endorsement reflects their comprehensive strategic vision for Availity’s cloud transformation. By combining hands-on experience with knowledge transfer, the EBA initiative showed that rapid migration execution can coexist with team enablement and operational excellence. This success reinforces their confidence in executing their ambitious data center exit and innovation strategies while continuing to deliver the high-quality services their healthcare customers expect.

Conclusion

The success of this EBA represents more than a technical achievement – it marks a milestone in Availity’s cloud transformation journey and sets a compelling blueprint for the healthcare industry. By combining AWS’s cloud expertise with Availity’s deep technical and healthcare knowledge, the EBA succeeded in efficiently migrating and modernizing complex healthcare systems while maintaining operational excellence adhered to strong security standards.

As Availity continues to execute their ambitious cloud strategy, the foundation built through this EBA – including repeatable migration patterns, upskilled teams, and optimized operational practices – will accelerate their remaining migrations and enhance innovation.

If you want to leverage Experience-Based Acceleration to enable and accelerate your company’s journey to AWS, contact your AWS Account Team or the EBA Team with this link.