Now that more than 90 percent of workloads have been migrated to the AWS Cloud, Halodoc has automated much of its deployment and database scaling, saving both time and money, while also improving availability. “Before moving to AWS, 20–30 percent of our time would be spent ensuring that servers are responsive. By using AWS, we simply deploy and maybe monitor for an hour and that’s it. Instead of carrying out routine maintenance, our DevOps team spends time thinking about products for our users,” says Ramakrishna. This enables the business to bring new app features to market about 30 percent faster than with the previous setup.

Data integrity and persistence is also vital in the healthcare industry. The Indonesian government requires all healthcare data be maintained for at least five years. By using Amazon RDS, Halodoc ensures that data stored in its app is never lost. “Things like automatic backups, snapshots, and multi-zone availability are taken care of, so we never have to spend time on that,” Ramakrishna adds.

Like most startups, Halodoc constantly strives to reduce its operational costs. The company’s management works closely with AWS to pursue continuous cost optimization models. For example, most of the 20–30 percent cost savings achieved have come through extensive use of Reserved Instances on Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS, instead of Spot Instances or On-Demand Instances.

Switching to Lambda has also helped trim expenses. “Lambda gives us an easier way to scale, so we can easily spin up or shut down instances,” says Ramakrishnan. “This becomes very important when launching new services like Lab, where we don’t know what to expect for demand or traffic patterns.”

In the six months since rebranding, the Halodoc app has notched over 500 percent growth in its user base. Its cloud architecture can scale seamlessly, and the improved system velocity, as well as automated monitoring through Amazon CloudWatch, enables the tech team to immediately address any bugs or other feedback received from app users.

Halodoc plans to invest heavily in continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) projects, and it is looking to adopt AWS tools to accelerate its plans. Ramakrishnan concludes, “AWS has enabled us to achieve our goals, also reaching out to give advice when we are stuck. It’s been a fantastic collaboration so far.”