As a leader in digital health technology, we are always looking for ways to improve how the outpatient Glooko diabetes management platform for healthcare providers and Glooko Mobile App for people with diabetes run behind the scenes.
For each release of our diabetes software, our engineering team explores new optimizations to make our solutions launch faster and run more reliably. While we often talk about new features for people with diabetes and healthcare providers, the technology powering these updates is just as important.
That operational reality is why our engineering team pays close attention to something most users never think about: how fast our systems can pull a file and start running.
Why Startup Time Matters for Diabetes Care
In the world of software, speed is a true business advantage. When our systems can start up faster, it means we can deploy new updates more quickly. It also means that if an issue ever occurs, our recovery times are much shorter. Every single second we save on startup time means less waiting around and a much more responsive system for the clinical community and the people managing their diabetes.
Faster startup means faster rollouts and faster recovery. For a healthcare provider in the middle of a patient review session or a person with diabetes checking glucose trends before a meal, a system that recovers in ten seconds instead of forty is a meaningfully different experience.
SOCI, the “Streaming” Solution
To make this happen, our team recently adopted a new open source technology developed by Amazon Web Services (AWS) called SOCI (“so-CHEE”), or Seekable Open Container Initiative.
To understand how it works, think about streaming a movie online. In the past, software systems often had to download the entire movie before it could even start playing. Now, the movie plays for you as soon as the first few minutes are available, while loading continues in the background through a concept called “lazy loading.” Rather than requiring our systems to pull an entire file set before starting up, SOCI fetches only the specific files needed to start immediately and the rest of the data “lazy loads” in the background.
Because we want to ensure the highest level of reliability for our users while meeting compliance requirements, the Glooko engineering team actually built our own custom process for creating these SOCI indexes. This gave us complete control over exactly how and when they are created, guaranteeing they perfectly match our strict deployment workflows.
This isn’t over-engineering. It’s what running a certified clinical platform available around the world requires.
The Results: 80% Faster Updates
The results of this engineering work are significant. We tested this new technology using a 1.1 gigabyte file.
- Before SOCI: The total time it took for the system to pull the image and start up was between 36 and 45 seconds.
- With SOCI: That total time dropped down to just 10 or 11 seconds.
That is an 80% faster launch time, with minimal additional storage overhead.
Looking Ahead
Because of this engineering success, our team plans to continue using this technology and expand it to other parts of the Glooko diabetes management ecosystem.
For people with diabetes and the healthcare providers who support them, this means diabetes management software that’s faster, more reliable, and updates with less disruption. By spending less time managing infrastructure, our team can spend more time building features into Glooko that really matter.
