Docplanner is the world’s biggest healthcare platform for booking doctor appointments and managing visits with 20M unique patients visits per month.

The sheer scale of their application required a reliable, scalable hosting solution. Docker containers run on Kubernetes infrastructure seemed a natural choice. However, managing and applying configuration changes on K8s clusters with the tools at their disposal proved problematic, to say the least.

What we disliked about the CI service we used before were dozens of bugs in the front-end making it sometimes impossible to use the app, very limited flexibility in modifying existing and adding new actions, and support team working in a different timezone.

— says Lukasz Barulski, Tech Lead at Docplanner.

One of the biggest assets of Buddy, on the other hand, is the ease of configuration: we don’t have to constantly look after and update the tools and CD we use anymore. Buddy covers a broad spectrum of things, from basic stuff like deployments, to notifying the BI team about db migrations, to cronjob configuration and updating language translations.

Due to a strict private policy, the company uses a standalone version of the service with an extra layer of security measures applied. The standalone is exactly the same as cloud-hosted Buddy in terms of features and flexibility, allowing them to push DevOps to the limits:

We have over 30 projects on Buddy, including ‘monolith’ with our legacy app and sso microservice. It has a staging pipeline for in-house preview updated on-the-fly with tested iterations of the service. The approach to production is a bit more conservative, with the deploy made three times a day on fixed time.

— adds Rafał Bocheński, Docplanner’s DevOps Engineer.

🔥 If you’d like to learn more about Kubernetes automation with Buddy, check out our dedicated K8s guide! 🔥