Guardant’s high-performance computing (HPC) solution analyses biological samples from clinics and laboratories for oncology research. It combines healthcare research and clinical data with developers’ algorithms, and requires the most stringent internal service level availability.

Given the critical nature of the team’s research, it is imperative that the HPC never go down. If it fails, the company delays critical oncology data that have the potential to save lives.

Given Guardant Health’s prior experience with managing the complexity of Kubernetes, the DevOps/SRE team knew exactly what it needed to streamline Kubernetes operations and ensure critical availability of its HPC solution.

After evaluating multiple vendors, Guardant Health selected Rafay Systems as its partner for Kubernetes operations as it was the only vendor that made operating multiple Kubernetes clusters easy to manage, more reliable, and enabled fast application deployment.

Rafay Systems exceeded Guardant Health’s requirements for security, governance, and visibility across its environments.

“Rafay offered a turnkey, Kubernetes operations solution that was up and running quickly, easy to manage and exceeded our strict security requirements,” comments Guardant Health chief information officer Kumud Kalia. “The thought leadership and white glove support from Rafay has been fantastic, which is a big win for our team.”

“Our team conducts research on a daily basis that the medical community relies on for treating their cancer patients, and we need to ensure that the HPC system is always available. If it goes down, our mission is compromised and patient’s lives are affected,” explains Guardant Health manager of infrastructure engineering William Baird on how the medical process works.

“With Rafay, our team now receives more alerts about data center temperature fluctuation than it does for issues with our Kubernetes Infrastructure. That’s a good thing and allows us to better focus on our goal of beating cancer and saving lives,” Baird adds.

Rafay Systems combines reliability and security with management simplicity
With Rafay Systems, Guardant Health was able to deploy an enterprise-grade Kubernetes operations practice to support its modern applications.

This allows for the rapid deployment of applications which can scale up and down to cater changing business demands.

The Kubernetes Operations Platform has been built with zero-trust security as a foundational capability. This feature allows Guardant Health to secure access to multiple Kubernetes clusters through its enterprise single sign-on solution, and enforce role-based access control for developers, DevOps engineers and SREs while automatically auditing all user actions for security and regulatory compliance.

“We are thankful to the Guardant team for their business and partnership,” concludes Rafay Systems CEO Haseeb Budhani. “Our work with Guardant demonstrates that Rafay supports enterprises of any scale including those in the Healthcare industry with demanding and complex environments that must adhere to the highest level of security and governance.”