Aster Digital Health partners with Facets to accelerate Platform Engineering and scale global cloud infrastructure for myAster

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.

Strategic Value Delivered by Facets

Before

• 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

• 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.

Challenges Faced by Aster

• 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.

How Facets Transformed Aster's Platform Engineering

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.
• Standardized and Optimized Configurations: Facets provided industry standard configurations for critical tools like Kubernetes and ELK
• Enhanced Security and Compliance: Facets enforced the use of well-architected infrastructure modules
• Cost Management and Savings: With features like scheduled environment hibernation, Facets helped Aster optimize resource utilization, reducing cloud costs by 52% per environment

Key Results

1.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.

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Aster clocked ~8000 self-service releases in the last 12 months, which translates to 21 releases a day!

2. 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.

3. 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.

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4. 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.

What Made the Difference?

Aster's transformation demonstrates the critical importance of platform engineering in regulated industries like healthcare. The key success factors included:

Healthcare-Focused Compliance: Facets understood the unique regulatory requirements of the healthcare industry and provided well-architected modules that ensure compliance by default.

Cost-Effective Scaling: Rather than simply adding more infrastructure, Facets enabled intelligent resource utilization through features like environment hibernation, allowing Aster to scale without proportional cost increases.

Developer Empowerment: The transition from weeks-long environment setup to on-demand provisioning fundamentally changed how Aster's development teams work, enabling true self-service capabilities.

"Earlier, we used to either repurpose existing environments or use time-based environment sharing among teams. Now, we can create on-demand environments on the go," noted Kadam Jeet Jain, CTO of Aster DM Healthcare.

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Outstanding Support: The Facets Secret Sauce

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.” -Kadam Jeet Jain , CTO, Aster DM Healthcare

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