Centris uses Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Developer Hub to build a modern developer portal

Centris AG (Centris) operates the Swiss Health Platform (SHP) in a demanding setup with more than 40 environments and a wide range of customer‑specific configurations. To further accelerate and simplify release management and deployment processes, Centris sought to increase standardization and automation.

ipt supported Centris in introducing DevOps principles, GitOps processes, and a new deployment pipeline powered by Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines and Red Hat OpenShift GitOps. As a result, time to market for new features has been reduced by 75% and the release frequency has increased by 300%. This new level of stability, combined with the transparency provided by Red Hat Developer Hub, further strengthens customer and developer confidence.

Benefits:

• Reduced time to market by 75% and increased release frequency by 300%
• Increased stability, cutting the number of support tickets by 20%
• Shared expert knowledge, building internal skills

Swiss health and accident insurers across Switzerland rely on Centris to develop and manage IT solutions that underpin their core insurance processes. At the center of this offering is Centris’s Swiss Health Platform (SHP), an open and scalable cloud‑based platform that supports insurance processes end-to-end—from claims handling and policy management to data exchange between healthcare system participants, including insurers, service providers, and digital partners.

“We built SHP on a multilevel infrastructure,” said Bruno Mann, Business Owner at Centris AG. “A base layer provides the four core business systems typically required by Swiss health insurers. An integration layer connects these systems to the wider ecosystem—including hospitals, medical practitioners, and public authorities. On the top layer, an app and web portal give end users secure access to their insurance information and claims.”

Centris operates at least 4 instances—development, test, staging, and production—of its multilayer architecture for each of its SHP customers under full outsourcing agreements, resulting in more than 40 active environments. Each customer brings individual integration needs: some connect via the Kafka layer, others through RESTful APIs; some include third‑party systems such as CRM tools, while others require specialized functionality. This diversity leads to highly customized combinations of components, versions, and configurations.

“Releasing software into more than 40 distinct environments with varying configurations required a high degree of coordination,” said Mann.

Quality assurance also demanded substantial rigor due to the heterogeneity of customer environments. Test cycles needed to accommodate a broad spectrum of variants, and documentation distributed across several systems made issue resolution more time‑intensive.

To further strengthen the development and operation of SHP, Centris brought in additional expertise from the local Red Hat partner, Innovation Process Technology AG (ipt). ipt assembled a specialized team that collaborated closely with Centris and conducted a systematic assessment of existing processes.

“ipt’s evaluation highlighted several opportunities to further modernize and streamline our deployment landscape—particularly in the areas of standardization, automation, and harmonization across customer environments. These insights laid the foundation for the subsequent transformation of our deployment and testing processes,” said David Studer, Product Owner at Centris AG.

As part of the joint transformation of the deployment process, ipt supported Centris in adopting and expanding DevOps principles, GitOps processes, and cloud-native technologies such as Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines (a Red Hat OpenShift operator that uses Tekton pipelines) and Red Hat OpenShift GitOps (a Red Hat OpenShift operator that builds on Argo CD).

• Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines provides a Kubernetes-native approach to automating software delivery pipelines. At Centris, the solution checks dependencies, ensures compatibility, and runs integration tests.
• Red Hat OpenShift GitOps integrates Git repositories, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools, and Kubernetes. At Centris, it provides the control loop, enforcing deployment manifests from a single source of truth and preventing manual changes.

The project delivered 2 pipelines. The first validates release environments and configurations to confirm releases can be installed reliably, then generates Argo CD resources, which are automatically applied once pushed to the Git repository. The second tests deployments to check that everything is up, running, and stable.

The modernized deployment solution runs on Red Hat OpenShift, where SHP’s application and integration layers are also deployed in dedicated namespaces. The Red Hat platform is built for multitenancy and runs in house on bare-metal servers in a local data center in Switzerland. Multitenancy sets up one Argo CD instance per tenant configuration, using a primary Argo CD instance to bootstrap the entire multitenant infrastructure.

ipt also supported Centris in introducing Red Hat Developer Hub, a distribution version of Backstage, to provide transparency and audibility for developers and customers. It also offers self-service capabilities for everything from environment provisioning to Day 2 operations. “The Red Hat Developer Hub provides a single interface for documentation and APIs,” said Mann. “Developers and customers can see product versions and dependencies and find out the state of health of their platform.”

Reduced time to market by 75% and increased release frequency by 300%

The pipelines have fundamentally transformed Centris’s releases, moving them away from a highly complex and manually intensive process to a fast and reproducible one—using the same manifests and configurations from development to production. Having a single source of truth reduces the risk of configuration drift, ensures consistency, and prevents unintended manual changes.

“Our processes had grown increasingly complex due to the diversity of customer environments,” said Studer. “Building an automated deployment pipeline with the Red Hat OpenShift operators has reduced time to market significantly while the increased stability gives developers the confidence to deliver releases more regularly and predictably.”

Increased stability, cutting the number of support tickets raised by 20%

Greater stability and transparency have directly contributed to a reduction in support tickets.

“Customer confidence in SHP has increased thanks to the new pipelines and portal,” said Studer. “Implementing end-to-end automation and reducing manual steps has significantly increased consistency and shortened issue‑resolution times.”

The pipelines check dependencies and help ensure that only compatible installations are deployed. Environment verification after deployment then confirms environment stability. “Red Hat technologies provide test automation with clearly defined quality gates to manage the different requirements from customers,” said Mann.

Red Hat Developer Hub, meanwhile, offers unified visibility and auditability, further strengthening customer trust. When support tickets are raised, the combination of consolidated documentation in the Developer Hub and the expertise within the DevOps team allows faster and more efficient resolution.

Shared expert knowledge, building internal skills

ipt contributed its expertise in modern DevOps and cloud-native practices, designing and implementing a resilient approach using the Red Hat portfolio. ipt brought a highly collaborative approach and cloud‑native technologies. Working side by side with Centris, ipt helped to refine its deployment architecture and establish practices that now form the foundation of its operational model.

ipt specifically delivered a flexible deployment process for the complex product and environment landscape within Centris, introducing modern technologies that allow Centris to transform into a more agile organization, reducing manual interactions to a minimum by elevating stability. ipt allowed Centris to provide self-service capabilities to internal employees and customers, giving them more control over their assets.

When the project ended, Centris continued the collaboration with ipt engineers within its teams, with pipeline and DevOps specialists transferring their knowledge. Today, Centris operates the environment independently, having established internal DevOps and pipeline capabilities as part of the joint project.

“ipt played a key role in accelerating the transformation of our software releases using the Red Hat portfolio,” said Studer. “Red Hat OpenShift and its operators are helping us scale our SHP offer. Our success with these Red Hat technologies showcases a repeatable, modern solution delivery framework.”

Since 2002, Centris AG has supported Swiss health and accident insurers with industry-standardized solutions ranging from modular services to comprehensive platform offerings. Today, Centris serves 23 insurance customers, including 9 that run their core systems on the Swiss Health Platform (SHP). Centris manages business-critical IT for approximately half of the Swiss insured population and plays an active role in promoting digital transformation across the national health ecosystem.