HARA Reduces IT Costs by 60 to 70% with AWS

Helping Farmers Improve Their Lives

Jakarta-based HARA launched the HARA data exchange platform in 2015 to improve the lives of smallholder farmers in Indonesia. HARA field officers collect several types of farmer-related data, such as crop planting and harvesting, through a mobile phone app. HARA incentivizes the farmers to provide the data by offering them loyalty points for the information. The farmers redeem the points via the HARA website for mobile phone credits and discounts on agriculture supplies. In the future, farmers will be able to redeem their points for advisory services to increase the productivity and quality of the crops.

Experiencing the Limitations of an On-Premises Infrastructure

At first, HARA's IT infrastructure ran on an on-premises server. Imron Zuhri, chief technology officer at HARA, says, “It took days to configure and stabilize new servers. We wanted a more scalable IT infrastructure. We looked at the cloud and considered Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and AWS [Amazon Web Services]. At the time, only AWS offered a stable Python 3.0 runtime to connect to our external library for geospatial data formats.”

“ We can expand the IT behind our platform with no fear of going over budget because we have reduced our capital and operational costs by 60 to 70 percent with AWS.”

Imron Zuhri, Chief Technology Officer, HARA

About Hara
Benefits
AWS Services Used

About Hara
HARA runs the HARA data exchange platform aimed at improving the income of smallholder farmers in Indonesia and creating jobs at the same time. HARA is a subsidiary of Dattabot, a big-data analytics company based in Jakarta.
Benefits
- Reduces IT costs by 60 to 70%
- Cuts IT capital expenditure
- Gains runtime and execution time support
- Enables easy server scaling
AWS Services Used

Going All-In on the Cloud

Today, the entire HARA IT infrastructure is in the AWS Cloud. This includes its website, the backend for its mobile app, and a blockchain platform for its data exchange. For the app backend, the application programming interface (API) calls from the mobile app trigger AWS Lambda serverless computing instances, which read/write data to Amazon ElastiCache and a production database. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances provide the server foundation for the platform while Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) is used for notifications.

Reduces IT Costs by 60 to 70%

By choosing AWS, HARA can meet its goal of onboarding 1 million smallholder farmers in Indonesia by 2020 without the IT infrastructure behind its data exchange platform becoming too costly to scale. Zuhri says, “We can expand the IT behind our platform with no fear of going over budget because we have reduced our capital and operational costs by 60 to 70 percent with AWS.”

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