NHS Portsmouth

Client Overview

The National Health Service (NHS) is the publicly funded healthcare system in England and one of the largest public sector organisations in the United Kingdom. NHS Portsmouth relies on Apache Cassandra as a core component of its digital platform. This distributed NoSQL database underpins critical healthcare services, offering scalability, availability, and resilience at the levels required to serve patients and healthcare professionals.

The Challenge

As NHS Portsmouth expanded its use of Cassandra, operating the database at scale became increasingly complex. Performance tuning, reliability during upgrades, and the need for robust on-premises architectures created operational challenges that the internal team could not address in isolation. Monitoring and alerting frameworks were underdeveloped, making it harder to detect issues before they escalated. At the same time, capacity pressures and budget constraints meant that running Cassandra cost-effectively was essential for long-term sustainability. Without access to specialised distributed systems expertise, the NHS team risked stability gaps in its digital platform, which could compromise the services it delivered to clinicians and patients.

The Solution

To address these challenges, NHS Portsmouth partnered with Digitalis.io to provide dedicated operational expertise. Working alongside the NHS engineering team, Digitalis helped configure and tune Cassandra to deliver the stability and performance the platform required. The collaboration included support for major Cassandra upgrades to ensure the platform remained compliant with vendor support and resilient against failures. Digitalis also designed a tailored monitoring and alerting strategy, giving the NHS team the tools to detect problems proactively and respond more effectively to incidents.

Beyond operations, Digitalis advised on the design of a scalable on-premises architecture and introduced Infrastructure-as-Code practices to standardise and automate deployments. The team supported production rollouts directly, ensuring deployments were seamless and low risk. Digitalis also worked on capacity modelling and cost optimisation, helping NHS Portsmouth strike a balance between delivering high availability and controlling infrastructure costs. Finally, developer support and day-to-day operational guidance were provided, embedding best practices into the NHS team’s workflow and ensuring long-term self-sufficiency.

The Outcomes

This partnership gave NHS Portsmouth a robust and reliable data foundation for its healthcare platform. With Cassandra now tuned for performance, monitored for reliability, and supported by efficient operating practices, the NHS team could confidently rely on its database in production. The improvements led to greater operational stability, faster detection and resolution of issues, and importantly, assurance that critical healthcare services could scale securely and reliably. Through capacity modelling and optimisation work, the platform became more cost-effective, allowing NHS to maximise its resources while maintaining quality of service.

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