Platform Engineering at the speed of State Government

About California Department of Health Care Services
The California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) is a state government agency
responsible for promoting public health, preventing disease, and ensuring access to quality
health care services for all Californians. With a mission to protect and improve the health of
Californians, DHCS operates various programs, including disease prevention and control, health promotion, and environmental health. As one the largest SLED (state, local, and education) organizations in the United States, DHCS serves a population larger than Australia and is about the size of home improvement giant Lowe’s. It is considered the most technologically advanced team in California State government and completes projects at the rate of a Silicon Valley startup.

Modernizing legacy healthcare technology:

My name is Jeff Garrett and I am the agency Section Chief of Factory overseeing the team responsible for the agency’s internal development platform, which includes everything from infrastructure to containers, pipelines, observability, and development processes. When I first stepped into this role, I was faced with legacy technology stacks — including mainframe systems — which made it difficult to modernize the agency’s applications and infrastructure and bring it current with government mandates and citizen expectations.

The sheer volume of internal and contractor development — all done on different technology platforms and coming from developers with varying degrees of resistance to change — required support that added more layers of complexity and made eliminating shadow IT projects through a common infrastructure platform a top priority, but a really tough one to achieve.

The agency is a large, complex organization with many different systems and applications underpinning programs that provide critical services to California residents. Our goal was to create a unified, streamlined, and secure infrastructure that would allow us to simplify our operations and be able to deliver services more effectively to our internal clients so they could better serve their external constituents.

Using Terraform has allowed us to standardize our infrastructure and reduce the time and effort required to deploy new resources. It has also given us greater visibility and control over our infrastructure, which has improved our ability to troubleshoot issues and respond to changes in demand.

Moving forward, we plan to standardize on Vault, Consul, Nomad and Packer because it will speed up our deliver by at least 40% along with some of the other tooling in our stack.

Infrastructure: AWS/Azure

Workload type: Internal Development Platform, APIs, Web, Db's, Data Mesh

Container Runtime: Docker/ContainerD

Orchestrator: Kubernetes

CI/CD: Circle Ci, Argo CD, Terraform

Version Control: GitHub

Provisioning: Terraform Cloud

Configuration Management: Gitops

Security management: HashiCorp Vault,