Improving Performance and Managing Costs Using Amazon Location Service with Halodoc

Halodoc is an Indonesian company that connects 20 million users with more than 20,000 licensed doctors for health consultations. It also provides access to over 4,900 partner pharmacies through its application, which supplies medicines, supplements, and various health products. Additionally, it facilitates seamless access to healthcare services, with the costs covered by insurance, in a single app.

Halodoc identified an opportunity to significantly reduce their costs by migrating from their existing mapping service to Amazon Location. Halodoc also migrated its geocoding, autocomplete, reverse geocoding, and places to Amazon Location because the service has high data quality and security. The company carried out a successful proof of concept in which it benchmarked point of interest and routing data against its ground truth data and found that the responses from Amazon Location were better than those from its existing provider.

Migrating to Amazon Location was a smooth process given the reliable support from AWS. “When we needed to obtain data or migrate API-related information, the AWS team was available to support us immediately, responding so that we could implement changes quickly,” says Subramanian Pothikannan, principal engineer and mobile team lead at Halodoc. Post-migration, Halodoc was able to optimize the traffic for its 20 million users.

By migrating to Amazon Location, Halodoc reduced costs for its geocoding and places by 88 percent. In addition to cost savings, the company enhanced data security under the AWS Shared Responsibility Model. “The location data stays in AWS and isn’t used in marketing as with other providers,” says Pothikannan. “The clarity about our data storage and security was a big plus for us.”

Using AWS tools, Halodoc gains the ability to monitor the API latency of Amazon Location, verifying performance that consistently aligns with its operational demands. In the 6 months after migrating to Amazon Location, Halodoc received 3 million requests for geocoding and 30 million requests for its place details API. “Using Amazon Location Service, performance has been smooth, and we haven’t faced any major challenges in the performance of our geocoding and places,” says Manivannan Chandrasekaran, director of engineering and site reliability engineer at Halodoc.

With the successful migration of its geocoding and places to Amazon Location, Halodoc is looking for further ways to improve and innovate using AWS. In particular, the company works closely alongside the AWS team to experiment with machine learning and generative artificial intelligence. The company is interested in learning about new features and functions as they become available in its region, and AWS keeps us informed about these developments.

“When migrating to Amazon Location, we had support from AWS to tackle challenges as they came up,” says Chandrasekaran. “Our migration experience was very smooth, with no major issues.”