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Discover how Aster DM Healthcare's consumer product, myAster, accelerated its infrastructure automation, optimized costs, and achieved multi-cloud scalability by leveraging Facets' Platform Engineering solution.
Earlier, we used to either repurpose existing environments or use time-based environment sharing among teams. This used to delay feature rollouts and affect productivity. Now, we can create on-demand environments on the go, scale-down when not needed, and that helps us being agile while staying cost optimal.
Aster DM Healthcare is one of the largest private healthcare providers in the GCC and India. myAster, a consumer product of Aster DM, enables users to book appointments, access virtual consultations, view lab reports, and order medications.
Hosted on Azure and built with microservices, myAster has scaled to over 1,300 resource instances and currently operates in the UAE, with plans to expand into Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, and India.
Kadam Jeet Jain, Aster's CTO and a former user of Facets at Treebo Hotels, successfully implemented Facets to solve infrastructure challenges, speed up tenant onboarding, and streamline deployments. He chose Facets again to meet the needs at Aster.
Before Facets:
Aster DM Healthcare, a leading healthcare provider, faced slow infrastructure setup, inconsistent configurations, and reliance on third-party vendors. These challenges delayed feature rollouts and increased operational inefficiencies, limiting their ability to scale.
After Facets:
By adopting Facets' platform-first approach, Aster streamlined infrastructure provisioning, empowered its development and operations teams with self-service tools, and standardized configurations across environments, improving security, compliance, and scalability.
Fragmented Infrastructure Management:
Fragmented infrastructure setup processes took weeks to complete, leading to slow development cycles and limited scalability
Inconsistent Configurations:
Tools like Kubernetes and ELK were not optimized, resulting in performance inefficiencies and inconsistent security measures.
Security and Compliance Concerns:
Vendor-managed infrastructure created risks of non-compliance and inconsistent configurations, which posed significant challenges for a healthcare company that operates in a heavily regulated industry.
High Operational Costs:
Provisioning for peak usage led to resource wastage and higher infrastructure costs.
In April 2023, Aster transitioned to Facets' platform-first solution, moving away from third-party vendors to an in-house Platforms team. Facets helped Aster overcome its infrastructure challenges through automation, cost optimization, and improved compliance.
Automation-Driven Infrastructure:
Aster Achieved 100% automation through Facets’ infrastructure platform engineering solution, reducing environment setup times from weeks to hours. This significantly improved Aster’s development agility.
Standardized and Optimized Configurations:
Facets provided Industry standard configurations for critical tools like Kubernetes and ELK, ensuring optimal performance and eliminating configuration inconsistencies.
Enhanced Security and Compliance:
Facets enforced the use of well-architected infrastructure modules, reducing the risks associated with vendor-managed infrastructure and ensuring adherence to healthcare regulations.
Cost Management and Savings:
With features like scheduled environment hibernation, Facets helped Aster optimize resource utilization, reducing cloud costs by 52% per environment while maintaining operational flexibility.
Increased Development Agility: With Facets, Aster reduced the time to create new environments from weeks to hours. It enabled the team to create more dev and test environments, allowing parallel testing and faster releases. The pace of QA and bug fixing improved, resulting in quicker production deployments.
“Earlier, we used to either repurpose existing environments or use time-based sharing to test on the same environments. Now, we can create on-demand environments on the go,” says Kadam.
Aster clocked ~8000 self-service releases in the last 12 months, which translates to 21 releases a day!
Cost Management: By using the “scheduled environment hibernation” feature in Facets, Aster prevented costs from rising despite an increase in the number of environments. Facets has empowered Aster’s Ops team to make informed decisions by providing out-of-the-box insights on cost and performance. Kadam is confident of achieving more cost savings in the future as they launch myAster in new geographies.
Using the above availability patterns and other techniques like spot management, myAster saved nearly 52% of costs per each lower environment with Facets.
Enhanced Ops Efficiency: Aster now operates with an efficient 3-member DevOps team, replacing third-party vendors. Now, the team focuses on high-value tasks rather than repetitive, manual work. This shift has notably boosted team satisfaction and learning opportunities.
“Earlier, the DevOps team used to be constantly busy with things like launching clusters, working on ironing out infrastructure issues or managing access. Now they can focus on more important tasks like experimenting with newer logging systems, and performance studies. It has increased the happiness quotient of the team." says Kadam.
Multi-Cloud Flexibility: Facets' cloud-agnostic framework enabled Aster to expand into new regions, such as Saudi Arabia, Oman, and India leveraging different cloud providers suitable for the region. Kadam notes that the ability to adapt to new cloud environments without significant re-architecture was a major benefit of using Facets.
Aster DM Healthcare’s successful integration of Facets demonstrates the transformative power of Platform Engineering. By automating infrastructure, standardizing processes, and empowering its teams, Aster has laid a solid foundation for further expansion of its digital healthcare services.
Facets will continue to support Aster as it grows globally, ensuring compliance, security, and cost efficiency
Aster has a global mission of expanding its hospitals, healthcare services, and digital care platform country by country. A strong automation foundation through Facets enables partnerships with multiple cloud providers across various regions, ensures compliance with regulatory norms, and enhances developer velocity to deliver cost-effective and secure healthcare solutions.
Self Serve Releases Per Day
Reduction in cloud cost per environment
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