How Cancer Research UK built a reliable, scalable user experience with AWS

Cancer Research UK is not only the largest independent cancer research charity in the UK, it’s the largest in the world. The organization is laser-focused on supporting researchers to better understand and treat cancer, as well as to provide information and support on the illness to patients and their loved ones.

Running such a widespread, critical charitable service requires extensive IT systems and a major cloud presence. Building this out has been no small feat and since its foundation 24 years ago Cancer Research UK has been on a major modernization journey.

A fundamental issue Cancer Research UK had to overcome was its legacy systems, which were linked to its origins. Cancer Research UK began as two separate organizations, the Cancer Research Campaign and the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, which merged in 2002 to become Cancer Research UK.

This merger, which brought together a combined 179 years of research, data, and achievements, also meant the consolidation of a huge amount of legacy tech.

“Cancer Research UK faced the challenge of any merger, which is how to bring those datasets together,” explains Pete Ainsworth, head of technology portfolio at Cancer Research UK. “It solved that challenge very much with a single vendor solution and that met the needs of the day. Over the years as it operated, that started to become very constrained.”

In the years following the merger, Cancer Research UK’s developer team followed a one-year release cycle, which it managed to bring down to one month. This reduced time frame put pressure on the organization, particularly during peak times of the year for charitable donations.

As it looked to break down its monolithic approach altogether, Cancer Research UK decided on a cloud-first approach and chose AWS as its cloud partner. More than anything, Ainsworth adds, Cancer Research UK wanted to improve the services it put in front of its audience.

The first fruits of this partnership were a donation platform and an event management system.

“There are some things in the charity space that are genuinely not commodity, that are specific to the space,” Ainsworth explains.

“The creation of a donation platform has been something that has persisted throughout as something that's quite specific to the charity space, because although underlying it is a standard payment system, over the top you have concerns around that specific to charity such as submitting Gift Aid to [HM Revenue and Customs].”

Events such as Cancer Research UK’s ‘Race for Life’ marathon come with very specific requirements, such as functionality for those raising money to pick specific ‘waves’ and timings for their run.

From the very beginning, Ainsworth says, these services were built and hosted in AWS. In the approximate decade since then, Cancer Research UK has expanded the number of services it uses within AWS to over 30 and rebuilt the donation platform into its Payments Web Service (PWS), a cloud-native solution for handling donations, payments, and refunds built in AWS using TypeScript and Node.js. The result is a far more streamlined offering that can scale to meet user demands and has driven a 94% reduction in payment system costs.

The power of AWS OGVA

Through AWS One Government Value Agreement (OGVA) – an agreement between Crown Commercial Service (CCS) and AWS – the hyperscaler has helped Cancer Research UK migrate systems and forecast its cloud demand for the coming years. The OGVA program unlocks significant cloud discounts for charities such as Cancer Research UK, with up to a 23% discount on the cost of cloud available for some organizations.

Cancer Research UK has a large engineering team working across all its projects at any given time and proactively seeks support from its AWS account manager and FinOps partner, Strategic Blue.

Strategic Blue has supported Cancer Research UK in maximizing the value of its cloud investment through the AWS OGVA by enabling access to the aforementioned discounts across eligible AWS services and by optimizing overall cloud expenditure while maintaining commercial flexibility. Beyond OGVA, Strategic Blue has delivered additional FinOps solutions, including structuring arrangements to cover 100% of Cancer Research UK’s compute usage at a discounted rate, generating approximately £25,000 of additional savings per year.

Through ongoing cost governance, commercial optimization, and strategic spend planning, these efficiencies allow Cancer Research UK to redirect more funding towards life-saving research and innovation.

In its ongoing efforts to improve its user experience, Cancer Research UK is leaning on AWS support via OGVA to align its data systems with its strategic targets.

Through OGVA, public sector organizations can not only unlock the discounts outlined above but also extensive training resources, technical support, and streamlined procurement processes.

In addition to helping organizations migrate workloads to the cloud, AWS helps customers to create a three-year forecast for AWS revenue and how they can best leverage the benefits of OGVA.

The importance of simplified procurement frameworks also shouldn’t be overlooked. As OGVA is pre-approved by the UK government through the memorandum of understanding (MoU) by which it was established, public sector organizations can embrace its benefits to skip unnecessary rounds of scoping and paperwork.

“The relationship we have with AWS is a very close one, we work very tightly in partnership with AWS and AWS are very generous with their time,” Ainsworth says.

“So we’ve always been very fortunate to take advantage of an array of skills within AWS, from direct FinOps skills they’ve brought into our space to technical essays.”

Ainsworth explains that the support teams are one of the most valuable aspects of OGVA, which allowed Cancer Research UK to expand support beyond only its most critical accounts.

“One of the key benefits comes with the requirement to have enterprise support as part of it – and that’s offset by the discount you receive, so it essentially becomes net free to you,” he says.

In addition, Cancer Research UK has made use of regular AWS office hours and is in continual conversation about how it’s using AWS and where there’s potential to adopt new services.

“Enterprise support provides you with top tier support across all of your accounts, so everything is covered. And that’s a very different category of support that you get, so we’ve leveraged it quite significantly across the estate, there’s a very active support service that’s provided and that can actually go quite deep beyond your surface-level incident response into problem solving as well.”

Now, Cancer Research UK is working with AWS and Strategic Blue to improve its overall customer and partner experience.

“At the moment, our journeys are fairly separate as you navigate through the Cancer Research UK offering and we're looking to turn that on its head so that whether you are a supporter running Race For Life with us, whether you are a health professional, an oncologist, a nurse, you are getting one journey through Cancer Research UK’s touch points,” Ainsworth says, “and we are, in many ways and like AWS, looking to be very customer centric.”

Ainsworth adds that, in addition to all this, Cancer Research UK’s team has made use of regular AWS office hours to engage its solution architects in ongoing conversations on how to best use AWS and develop new services on the cloud platform.

For example, Cancer Research UK has just started using Research and Engineering Studio on AWS (RES), a web-based portal for creating and accessing cloud-based research environments based on Amazon EC2 virtual desktops. The portal opens cloud visualizations and high-performance environments to researchers who may lack cloud expertise.

Cancer Research UK is also expanding its access to AWS HealthOmics, a secure cloud service for processing genomics data at scale, having developed a precursor of the service Cambridge Functional Genomics Centre in partnership with AstraZeneca.

Scalability, agility, and reliability have been some of the chief benefits Cancer Research UK has enjoyed as a result of the partnership.

For example the Stand Up to Cancer (SU2C) telethon, a campaign which brings together television special episodes and a live broadcast to raise funds for cancer research, Cancer Research UK sees the number of visitors to its site and donations skyrocket.

Ainsworth says Cancer Research UK’s old payment platform was “brittle” and “written in a language that we didn’t support very well in the organization,” making it hard to support during the campaign.

“We were quite used to those telethons … being quite challenging nights – actually a challenging few days, because we have a lead in and a lead out as well,” he says.

“The last telethon we ran this year was remarkably successful and we have not only built on the resilience of the core payments platform but also extended up to utilizing Contentful for CMS, with a React front end across the whole system.

“That whole system together was absolutely bulletproof – we didn't have a single blip for the whole night, and it just makes something that was incredibly challenging before incredibly easy and an enjoyable experience for us to carry out,” he says.

Ainsworth adds that everything ran smoothly even during a massive spike in traffic driven by a surprise visit from King Charles III and televised broadcast by the king paying tribute to the community of care around cancer patients and the importance of early diagnosis supported by organizations such as Cancer Research UK. This, he explains, is a testament to Cancer Research UK’s software engineering teams and the reliability of its systems on AWS.

In the future Cancer Research UK aims to modernize its tech stack further, including exploring how AI can improve its patient experiences via its information services and communications teams.

“I would just say for charity customers, it's not an obvious first port of call to look at OGVA, because it's very much set up around government,” Ainsworth acknowledged.

“But it’s open to all charities and I think, as a little call out to people, if you are growing your usage of AWS cloud it's kind of a no-brainer.”