Betterfly Optimizes Dynamic Insurance Using API Gateway

Well-known Chilean businessman and triathlete Eduardo della Maggiora founded Burn to Give in 2018, intertwining the core values of profitability, health, and social impact. Consumers used the Burn to Give application to track their exercise in exchange for corresponding corporate donations of meals to malnourished people. As a startup, the company received expert support and substantial credits toward the use of AWS services as part of the AWS Activate Startup Program, which provides startups with the resources they need to build, launch, and scale on AWS. In 2020, the company continued to use AWS as it pivoted to a business-to-business model and changed its name to Betterfly.

Betterfly provides companies with a single access point to deliver preventive services, dynamic life insurance, and a digital currency that gamifies users’ motivation to care for themselves. Betterfly users grow their insurance benefits in response to the healthy habits they build through the use of third-party applications that track meditation, sleep, and other healthy behaviors. They also earn Better Coins, a digital currency that they can exchange for charitable donations.

In February 2021, Betterfly successfully relaunched its application and sought to manage costs as operations scaled rapidly with a corresponding increase in the amount of data, which reached about 1 TB per year. “We have always considered ourselves a data-driven company,” says Arturo Tagle, director of engineering at Betterfly. “Data is one of our biggest assets.” Betterfly’s potential customers closely examine its data privacy and security protocols. “We have some very large corporate clients that perform tough due diligence before getting Betterfly for their employees,” says Andrés Liberman, chief information officer at Betterfly. “We just tell them that AWS is our cloud provider. They know that AWS is secure.”

By the end of 2022, Betterfly had expanded to serve more than 4,000 corporate clients in eight countries. “That big launch to many countries happened in the course of a year,” says Liberman. “And it would have been very, very hard without the support of AWS.” For example, Betterfly expanded to an additional AWS Region so that it could use a service unavailable locally: Amazon Aurora, a MySQL- and PostgreSQL-compatible database built for the cloud.

To handle all of the tasks involved in accepting and processing API calls, Betterfly turned to Amazon API Gateway, a fully managed service that makes it simple for developers to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale. Using Amazon API Gateway, Betterfly connects users’ mobile phones, wearable devices, third-party applications, and client dashboards to backend resources on AWS. “When the right APIs are built and the technology is correct, users connect to other applications while they stay in Betterfly,” says Tagle. “The advantage is happy users who have a virtually frictionless experience.”

Betterfly further simplifies the backend through the use of AWS Glue, a serverless data integration service that makes it simple to discover, prepare, move, and integrate data from multiple sources for analytics, machine learning (ML), and application development. Using AWS Glue, Betterfly automates the movement of data from its databases into a data warehouse built on Amazon Redshift, which lets organizations run and scale analytics in seconds without having to manage the data warehouse infrastructure. Betterfly also built a data lake using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service offering industry-leading scalability, data availability, security, and performance.

Betterfly uses its data to train ML models using Amazon SageMaker, which lets organizations build, train, and deploy ML models for any use case with fully managed infrastructure, tools, and workflows. The company has been developing ML models that push personalized recommendations to users. “Using Amazon SageMaker, it has been really simple to integrate the data into the models and then to push the models to production,” says Tagle.

Betterfly builds observability into its cloud operations using Amazon CloudWatch, which collects and visualizes near-real-time logs, metrics, and event data in automated dashboards to streamline infrastructure and application maintenance. Betterfly acts upon the data it collects through Datadog, an AWS Partner that connects seamlessly to Amazon CloudWatch to present a unified view of Betterfly’s entire technology stack.

Improved observability has helped to drive cost savings. “We started to see the natural inefficiencies of exponential growth,” says Liberman. “When we see our architecture working, it feeds back to the design. We can prioritize certain services and optimize costs according to traffic and volume.” In fact, Betterfly has cut costs by 5 percent month over month as it worked alongside AWS to improve its run rate by 40–50 percent.