Case Study: The National Center for Biotechnology Information modernizes hybrid cloud services with HashiCorp

The NCBI's legacy migration to hybrid cloud with Consul and Nomad

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), part of the NIH, supports a high-volume biomedical platform used by about 4.2 million users per day and handling peak traffic of around 7,000 web requests per second. To modernize a large, diverse legacy portfolio and move from 100% on-premises infrastructure to a hybrid cloud model, NCBI worked with HashiCorp products including Nomad for cluster scheduling and Consul for service registry and discovery.

HashiCorp helped NCBI build a DevOps pipeline that supported blue-green and canary deployments, per-request traffic overrides, and a service mesh approach for gradually migrating services without disrupting users. With HashiCorp’s Nomad and Consul in production, NCBI gained more uniform operations across on-prem and cloud environments, improved deployment flexibility, and stronger resilience; the team reported running Linkerd-based service mesh traffic at about 5,000 requests per second across roughly 1,000 new and legacy services.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information

Kamen Todorov

DevOps Program Head