Sharing Large Files using Nextcloud

• Halodoc is a health-tech platform aiming to simplify access to healthcare for millions of people around Indonesia. Over the years, we from BI Engineer team at Halodoc has played an important role in its growth and development, colaborate with Data team provide information of data to giving clean and correct information, so analyst team can made a qualified insight to company.

Background

• File sharing could be a challenging task to do, the needs of every department or division vary, it involves either complex or huge data files. One of the options that we utilize is by using BI Tools such as Metabase or Looker, although both of these tools helped in most cases, they came with a limitation on file sharing side that are more than 15 MB through their platform. To tackle this problem we optioned to utilize a file sharing platform.
• This file sharing tool that we use in halodoc is an open source tool called Nextcloud.

What is Nextcloud?

It is a self-hosted open-source file sync and share server. It is a cloud storage solution that allows users to have as much capacity as they like.

Why Nextcloud?

1. It is self-hosted

• Because the data are stored in a local server so we know where the physical data are located and who has access to it
• Full control of the privacy and security

2. Free and open source

• Allows adding functionality to the server

3. Growing community

• Pros of every open source software is the community, it is easier to find the solution to issues

4. Scalability

• It has features that can be joined with other scalable solutions
• It is developed with a globally scalable solution in mind

5. Accessible via mobile phone application and Web Browser

How does it works ?

• Nextcloud provided us with user-friendly GUI that are letting non-tech users to easily setup the path or file they needed from company's S3 Bucket.

• We created a folder in Nextcloud and connected it with this AWS S3 Bucket.
• Google SSO is implemented for security and privacy reasons, and the platform could only be accessed through internal (VPN) connection.

• When user logins to this Nextcloud, the home screen would be like the above picture.

• We use UAC based on group by department and product. So only people that belong to the group/department can access this folder.
• And since we were using this AWS S3 bucket for this Nextcloud, there was no limitation (quota) for each storage per user.
• Also, this Nextcloud can be connected to other tools, e.g Looker, Airflow, etc.

• Using Looker, users can create scheduled reports and save the results to S3 buckets. These files usually are too large if they are sent via emails.
• Some example for this case if finance team need some data for purpose reconcile and this data was quite big also they needed it for weekly.

• We use looker to schedule it to Nextcloud. we just need to connect this access key and secret key and select the path for this folder in Nextcloud.

Some cons

• We cannot share it with an outside company, since it uses VPN.
• It’s not 100% free, since behind this Nextcloud we are using AWS S3.
• There is a price if we want to get support from the Nextcloud official team.
• We need to maintain so many AWS S3 buckets, since access setting for each user was based on group. If we create a new folder under the same S3 bucket, then you need to give access to the parent folder, hence the user can access other folders that do not belong to it.

Join us

We are looking for experienced BI Engineer to come and help us in our mission to simplify healthcare. If you are looking to work on challenging data that drive significant impact to enthral you, check all the available data jobs on Halodoc's Career Page here.

About Halodoc

Halodoc is the number 1 all around Healthcare application in Indonesia. Our mission is to simplify and bring quality healthcare across Indonesia, from Sabang to Merauke. We connect 20,000+ doctors with patients in need through our Tele-consultation service. We partner with 3500+ pharmacies in 100+ cities to bring medicine to your doorstep. We've also partnered with Indonesia's largest lab provider to provide lab home services, and to top it off we have recently launched a premium appointment service that partners with 500+ hospitals that allow patients to book a doctor appointment inside our application. We are extremely fortunate to be trusted by our investors, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Singtel, UOB Ventures, Allianz, GoJek, Astra, Temasek and many more. We recently closed our Series C round and In total have raised around USD$180 million for our mission. Our team works tirelessly to make sure that we create the best healthcare solution personalised for all of our patient's needs, and are continuously on a path to simplify healthcare for Indonesia.