If you run latency-sensitive workloads that must stay on premises (whether for data residency, compliance, or proximity to existing databases), you face a familiar trade-off: keep the workload close to the data or adopt a cloud-native operating model. This post shows how you can do both. athenahealth used Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) Hybrid Nodes to cut response times in half, reduce hardware and operational costs by 50 percent, and maintain a single Kubernetes operating model across its data center and the cloud.
athenahealth serves more than 160,000 healthcare providers through electronic health records (EHR) and patient portal applications. Because regulated patient data must remain on premises, the company ran these workloads on AWS Outposts . As athenahealth standardized on Kubernetes across its application portfolio, the team looked for a way to extend its Amazon EKS operating model to applications running in its data centers. Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes provided that consistency while preserving data residency and compliance requirements.
In this post, we walk through athenahealth’s architecture, the decisions that shaped it, and the measurable outcomes. Whether you’re evaluating hybrid Kubernetes options or planning an on-premises modernization, this architecture provides a validated reference. athenahealth’s EHR and patient portal workloads run adjacent to sensitive patient data that must remain on premises. As part of its platform modernization, the company decided to standardize on Kubernetes and Amazon EKS.
The team therefore needed an architecture that could bring the same Kubernetes tooling, deployment practices, and operational processes to its on-premises workloads while continuing to meet its data residency requirements. The team defined three requirements for the next architecture: In short, athenahealth needed on-premises compute with cloud-consistent operations. Amazon EKS Hybrid Nodes met that need through a single-cluster model: the EKS control plane runs in an AWS Region while on-premises worker nodes join the same cluster.