Spring Health™ is a platform designed to connect people to mental health care and support when they need it most. Founded in 2016, they’re now one of the world’s most impressive mental health Unicorn scaleups (worth over $2 billion). They provide on-demand mental health solutions for consumers, employers, and health care providers.
When Spring Health’s customer-base doubled in one year, it caused serious growing pains. Especially when it came to DevOps, with a small team meeting the needs of 200 engineers.
Cloud spending increased dramatically, and Spring Health’s previous infrastructure provider could not scale with that growth.
In this case study, we’ll show you how we supported an AWS cloud migration and automated DevOps for a mental health provider that couldn’t for their own or customer’s sake afford even 30-seconds of downtime.
Key Takeaways
- With 100s of businesses and healthcare providers worldwide relying on Spring Health to provide on-demand mental health support for employees, and 92% of those showing clinical improvements, this is a company that can’t afford any downtime.
- And yet, with 2X more customers than in 2024, Spring Health had to migrate 100% of its cloud infrastructure while maintaining HIPAA compliance and HITRUST certification.
- With a small DevOps team, they knew help with a cloud migration was needed. They picked AWS, and AWS recommended DuploCloud to manage the migration and automate as much of DevOps as possible going forward.
The Challenge
Spring Health operates as a critical service for employers and health plans. For a company in this space, reliability is everything. The leadership and engineering team treats operational downtime as a direct risk to patient care, trust, and the company’s reputation.
“… If [Spring Health] isn’t running, that 30 seconds suddenly stretches out to minutes, hours… That is somebody’s lifeline being stretched out longer than it needs to be.”
Jack Yuan, Associate Director of Engineering, Spring Health
Spring Health’s customer base doubled year over year. Their previous
infrastructure providers could not scale with that growth. Engineers faced hard container limits, limited autoscaling of only one service at a time, and daily backups that risked up to 24 hours of data loss.
None of these were acceptable, not with the amount of support the company was providing to people and employers worldwide.
Their small DevOps team supported more than 200 engineers and needed a
migration path that protected reliability without forcing a major team expansion.
The team was also under pressure to preserve HIPAA compliance during the cloud migration and avoid any coverage gaps that might endanger their HITRUST certification.
How to do a cloud migration safely, without failing compliance?
Spring Health knew they had to do a cloud migration, and this meant exploring the options for a cloud platform that would deliver everything they needed.
After evaluating alternatives, Spring Health chose AWS for its numerous technical advantages:
- OpenSearch delivered nearly 2x performance at the same price.
- Aurora RDS reduced failover times from minutes to seconds.
- SageMaker, Bedrock, and Jupyter Notebooks enabled rapid AI/ML prototyping.
- DataDog integration provided full visibility into infrastructure metrics, which enabled precise performance.
However, before they could benefit from these, there was one major challenge left: how does an organization maintain HIPAA compliance throughout a migration without a large (and expensive) security team?
The answer came as a recommendation from AWS: DuploCloud.
Ready to explore how we can handle automated, fully-compliant, and secure cloud migrations? Letting us take care of your DevOps will accelerate your growth and help you serve even more customers better. Book a demo with us today.
The Solution: A HIPAA-compliant, completely secure, cost-saving migration with zero downtime
After extensive planning and a one-month POC, Spring Health executed their migration in just four months.
DuploCloud ensured all infrastructure was HIPAA-compliant by default on day one, while automated evidence collection eliminated manual audit preparation work.
But for the DevOps and security team at Spring Health, the real differentiator was the collaboration model. The migration happened in two carefully orchestrated phases over four months, a remarkably fast execution for a HITRUST-regulated workload.
Phase 1: Database migration
Spring Health scheduled a four-hour window overnight to migrate. They took snapshots of their databases, loaded them into AWS RDS Aurora, and pointed legacy applications to the new AWS databases via VPC peering.
Phase 2: Application migration
Over three weeks, Spring Health incrementally redirected traffic to AWS: 10%, 20%, 40% until they hit 100%. Each step of their migration was calculated to maximize security and efficiency.
Key results of the successful AWS migration
- 99% SLA achieved, ensuring always-on critical mental health services
- 30-40%reduction in cloud spend for equivalent infrastructure, despite massive expansion in AI/ML capabilities post-migration
- 2.5x more environments running, with data platform and AI/ML teams self-serving infrastructure deployment
- 10-20% overall performance improvement with up to 2x gains for specific services like OpenSearch
- 1 Min Maximum data loss down from one day to just one minute
With no unexpected downtime or failures and immediate performance improvements following the migration, the process was a clear success, and culminated in a smooth 2025 HITRUST recertification.
Post-migration, Spring Health expanded from six environments to fifteen and onboarded their data platform and AI/ML teams to AWS. DuploCloud enabled these teams to self-serve infrastructure deployment while maintaining compliance by default.
The migration unlocked AWS-native solutions that transformed Spring Health’s technical capabilities. Spring Health ran faster, recovered from issues more quickly, and gave engineers access to tools that enabled easier building and monitoring of AI applications with full visibility and compliance
“We worked with them, we built it, we made it work together…The feedback loop there was very short, which was great. We loved the fact that when we
needed help, we got a response nearly immediately. It’s also brilliant that whatever they spin up is HIPAA compliant… That’s just one less thing to worry about.”
Jack Yuan, Associate Director of Engineering, Spring Health
Ready to explore how we can handle automated, fully-compliant, and secure cloud migrations? Letting us take care of your DevOps will accelerate your growth and help you serve even more customers better. Book a demo with us today.
