Managing the Healthcare.gov Cloud Migration

Migrating the back-end system components to the cloud was a massive endeavor full of technical, communication, and business operations challenges. Operating around the clock 365 days a year, Healthcare.gov manages more than two petabytes of data used to serve health insurance customers on the front end, along with back-end systems that provide data management and services to the consumer-facing applications.

On average, about 10,000 users access the site daily. But during the system’s peak operating period of open enrollment in November and December, site traffic increases by as much as 10 to 15 times. To provide for this business capability, CMS leveraged three data centers and their associated physical hardware assets. Exchange systems were scaled to support peak levels of service year-round yet were only needed at peak scale during the limited business cycle windows (e.g., consumer open enrollment, issuer plan submission). It was clear that the costs associated with the existing solution were not sustainable for the long term.

To successfully complete this endeavor, both education and communication were critical. Hundreds of stakeholders had widely varying understanding of what CCIIO provided, let alone how cloud computing would impact it. In consultation with CCIIO leadership, Booz Allen’s experts quickly realized they needed to enhance collaboration and mature the collective understanding of cloud and cloud architecture and build buy-in for the initiative.

The Booz Allen team created a multifaceted plan comprised of a technical transformation to embrace DevOps and automation in addition to a strategic communications plan with consistent messaging tailored for different audiences. To commit to consistency across system operations, we developed a concept of operations for shared services to be leveraged by all systems in addition to workstreams to increase cloud adoption through data migration efficiencies and architectural workshops with teams. A key message that CCIIO leadership established early on: “The cloud migration will do no harm to open enrollment.” Because open enrollment is consumer-facing, any possibility of disruption was a major stress point for CCIIO’s business owners and teams. In building the migration plan, Booz Allen worked with CCIIO to ensure business would be affected as little as possible and that consumers would have a reliable user experience.

On the first business day of operations in the cloud, processes were already running faster. For example, 8-hour database backups decreased to 3 hours with AWS’s data processing and storage at scale. During the ramp up to open enrollment, testing environment scale up and scale out activities took hours instead of weeks. With back-end systems smoothly operating in their new secure cloud home, teams have transitioned to the optimization phase to fully implement automation and autoscaling. In addition, with the major transformational change that happened behind the scenes, it was a seamless front-end transition for the thousands of consumers who access Healthcare.gov every day.