LetsGetChecked is a global healthcare company enabling patients to manage their health from home with at-home testing, genetic sequencing, virtual consultations, and medication delivery. Supporting this end-to-end model requires highly reliable software that's always ready for every click, call, and delivery. When pandemic-driven demand made scaling urgent, Chief Software Engineer Javier de Vega Ruiz knew the technical challenge was familiar, but the stakes were higher than ever.
To maintain reliability while innovating to meet growing customer demand, the team turned to Cortex and achieved significant results:
Cut Mean Time to Restore by 67%. With auto-sync service catalogs and Engineering Homepage, the TechOps team can quickly find ownership and route incidents to the right developers.
2x deployment frequency in months. The team went from 17 deployments per week to 32, hitting their year-long goal of 25+ deployments months ahead of schedule.
Accelerated Kubernetes migration by 8 months. What was projected as a 24-month migration was completed in 16 months, capturing savings and productivity benefits earlier than expected.
Positioned for 75% hosting cost reduction. Moving services from EC2 and Windows to containerized Kubernetes and Linux will dramatically reduce monthly infrastructure costs.
The challenge: Microservices velocity created new quality and compliance risks
When the engineering team grew beyond 15 developers, LetsGetChecked's monolithic architecture began to slow them down. Too many engineers were fighting to merge code into the same few repositories, creating bottlenecks in the deployment pipeline.
The solution was a shift to microservices. Splitting existing services and creating new ones allowed teams to work in parallel and regain speed. But as the number of services grew from 15 to 100 in under a year, a new challenge emerged: maintaining quality and compliance without losing momentum.
"We saw services become too big and too slow, hurting our ability to keep up with the innovation our user base required," Javier says. "But in healthcare, with regulations like HIPAA and HITRUST, you can't sacrifice compliance for speed."
Healthcare regulations and the risks of unreliable code have traditionally capped the pace of innovation in healthtech. Even with microservices, success depends on how quickly teams can meet quality and compliance standards without slowing delivery.
The solution: Embedding standards directly into workflows
Javier and his team realized the fastest way to ensure both quality and compliance was to bake the necessary steps into every initiative. He adds, "Whether you're migrating systems or building a service, everything should include a step-by-step plan for developers."
In response, LetsGetChecked turned to Cortex to embed these standards directly into workflows, giving the team a clear and scalable path to operational excellence. The approach centered on three core capabilities: catalogs for faster incident response, Scorecards for driving operational excellence, and Initiatives for accelerating migrations.
The results: Faster delivery without compromising reliability
Since adopting Cortex, LetsGetChecked has transformed how quickly they can deliver while maintaining the reliability their patients depend on.
Dramatically faster incident response
LetsGetChecked's TechOps team is tasked with triaging reported incidents. After a ticket comes in, one of the first steps is finding who's responsible. Without a system for cataloging and routinely updating ownership information, the TechOps team would blast Slack channels with 100+ engineers, which proved inefficient.
Now, with auto-sync service and resource catalogs in Cortex, the TechOps team can quickly reference who's on call and where to contact them, while the JIRA ticket gets dropped into that developer's priority queue in their Engineering Homepage.
"One of the biggest improvements we've seen since implementing Cortex is in our Mean Time to Restore—which we were able to reduce by 67%. Being able to quickly find up-to-date service information, and have requests immediately prioritized is a small operational change that has enormous impact." — Javier de Vega Ruiz, Chief Software Engineer, LetsGetChecked
Scorecards that drive healthy competition
Beyond easing access to information about existing software, LetsGetChecked is raising the bar for new software with Scorecards for onboarding, service maturity, and deployment frequency.
"There's a gamification element in Cortex where teams can compare themselves to one another," Javier explains. "Anyone can see straight away who's improving, who's falling behind, and who needs more support."
The deployment frequency Scorecard set goals for weekly deployment metrics, enabling teams to benchmark progress against peers. The results were striking.
"With Cortex, we set a year-long goal of hitting 25 deployments per week. Within months, we went from 17 per week to 32." — Javier de Vega Ruiz, Chief Software Engineer, LetsGetChecked
Accelerating migrations that matter
While alignment to best practices can improve service health, proactive infrastructure decisions often have the biggest impact on reliability and performance. LetsGetChecked uses Cortex to drive organization-wide initiatives on strict timelines.
The most exciting example is the team's project to move services off EC2 and Windows to a containerized model in Kubernetes and Linux. With higher density deployments and elastic provisioning now much easier to set up, the team's monthly hosting costs are set to drop by 75%. But the benefits extend beyond cost savings.
"I'm super excited. The savings are huge. But so are the improvements to developer experience," Javier says. "Soon, devs will be able to run advanced testing scenarios before deploying against their own 'local cloud' on their laptop, shortening feedback cycles and increasing productivity."
To accelerate these outcomes, LetsGetChecked leverages Cortex Initiatives, Scaffolding, and custom alerting to make action obvious for developers and keep them focused on priorities.
"In the case of our Kubernetes migration, the ability to drive timely action cut our projected timeline from 24 months down to 16, enabling us to capture savings and productivity benefits 8 months earlier than expected." — Javier de Vega Ruiz, Chief Software Engineer, LetsGetChecked
Building a culture where developers own what they build
LetsGetChecked has done a remarkable job of meeting demand without compromising on the quality or reliability of the life-saving systems they support. Javier's advice for teams beginning their journey toward operational excellence is to start with metrics as soon as possible. "The obvious ones are software delivery and SRE metrics, like deployment velocity and MTTR, tend to be easiest to track and change," he says. But metrics are only part of the story. The real transformation happens when teams understand the full scope of their work.
"The finish line isn't merging a PR, but ensuring software you own actually works in production. Collecting telemetry, setting up alerts, and owning the fix," Javier explains. "Cortex brings all of the inputs for this work into one space so devs can really take ownership over what they build, without slowing them down."
Ready to build a culture of continuous improvement? See how Cortex can help your team accelerate your journey toward engineering excellence. Book a demo today.
