WMDA
World Marrow Donor Association (WMDA) was founded in 1988 and is located in Leiden, The Netherlands. With over 1100 members, a leading association that coordinates the collection of the HLA phenotypes and other relevant data of volunteer hematopoietic cell donors and cord blood units across the globe.
Today, the Search & Match Service of WMDA is the world’s largest hematopoietic cell database, listing more than 30 million stem cell donors and over 750,000 cord blood units. WMDA participants consist of 75 hematopoietic cell donor registries from 53 countries, and 53 cord blood banks from 36 countries.
These global hematopoietic cells from donors or cord blood units are used to transplant patients around the world with a variety of with life-threatening blood disorders such as leukemia, lymphoma, aplastic anemia, as well as certain immune system and metabolic disorders.
Their challenge
The growing supply and demand of donors and patients requires a future-proof, modern and fast IT environment that is always up to date and, above all, reliable.
Application modernisation
WMDA used JAVA and PHP based applications. These applications run on virtual machines. To reduce operational pressure, when maintaining these virtual machines, the choice was made to use Azure App Services. The current application architecture was dissected and services were separated and housed in solutions such as WebApp, Web Apps for containers, Azure Functions and Logic Apps and Windows & Linux servers.
In their current environment they did not have foundation to control the application landscapes. The by InSpark designed Azure foundation and landing zones made it possible for the WMDA development team to build their applications on top of it.
The Modernization methodology supports a microservices architecture where the components are smaller, loosely coupled, and can be deployed and scaled independently. Application modernization involves redefining, upgrading, and aligning existing applications to meet evolving business needs and accommodate future requirements. It leverages embracing to use technologies, including Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), DevOps, Containers and Serverless Computing.
Together with WMDA we choose to rearchitect the current application landscape so they meet scalability requirements in a cost-effective way and integrate the newest Azure capabilities to their applications.
The databases were assessed with the Data Migration Assistant tool (DMA) to provide compatibility insights for with Azure SQL. The DMA tool provided the required information to resolve any database compatibility issues and was subsequently used to rehost the databases to Azure SQL.
WMDA used JAVA and PHP based applications. These applications run on virtual machines. To reduce operational pressure, when maintaining these virtual machines, the choice was made to use Azure App Services. The current application architecture was dissected and services were separated and housed in solutions such as WebApp, Web Apps for containers, Azure Functions and Logic Apps.
The result
The modernization of the environment gives businesses the freedom to customize the application modernization processes to meet their individual business requirements and challenges. The new IT environment offers exactly the flexibility and scalibility that helps WMDA to scale their Donor Search and Match Service and all applications needed.
