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Ease of Use with Scale: Ultralight's Move from PaaS to the Cloud with Coherence

Ultralight's journey from a PaaS provider to AWS
July 18, 2023

Company: Ultralight

Industry: Medical Device Operations

Size: 5 employees

Usage: 400+ deployments/month

Introducing Ultralight

Ultralight is a company at the forefront of revolutionizing medical device innovation through streamlined operational workflows. Their platform simplifies requirements and risk management, end-to-end traceability, and compliance activities, providing a lightweight solution optimized for modern device development.

Our goal is to help medical device companies get from 0 to 1 and beyond; it’s not to get stuck in the endless loop of writing Terraform modules, or getting blocked by the limitations of a PaaS.

Why Ultralight Chose Coherence

Ultralight sought a development toolchain that would promote code quality, facilitate streamlined testing, and enhance overall development velocity. Ultralight desired a solution which would be easy to manage, and would scale with them. They started off using a Platform-as-a-Service, but realized it was too much of a black box with lack of extensibility, and wouldn't scale with their needs. They also didn’t want to manage their own infrastructure on larger cloud providers, and wanted a middle ground. They decided to migrate to AWS + Coherence as they onboarded customers, after seeing that it was the right fit for them.

CTO Shiv Ghai explains, "Using Coherence allows us to harness the capabilities of AWS in the simplest possible way. Our goal is to help medical device companies get from 0 to 1 and beyond; it’s not to get stuck in the endless loop of writing Terraform modules, or getting blocked by the limitations of a PaaS. As we transitioned from a PaaS, we sought a solution that offered ease of use with greater cost control, with best practices out of the box."

The Pain Coherence is Solving

Ultralight aimed to establish a professional-grade development toolchain on AWS without the need for extensive internal tooling and infrastructure management. They required a solution that streamlined testing processes, improved software development velocity, and facilitated seamless scaling as their business grew.

The Solution

Coherence's full-lifecycle solution offered Ultralight an enterprise-grade development toolchain that encompassed ephemeral preview environments for every pull request, seamless integrations with GitHub and Slack, comprehensive CI/CD capabilities, and AWS-based deployments. Coherence seamlessly integrated with Ultralight's existing tech stack, enhancing their development workflow.

The Final Result

By adopting Coherence, Ultralight achieved an integrated development workflow on AWS, fully supporting their stack. The team leveraged Coherence's ephemeral preview environments, enabling isolated testing environments for each pull request. Additionally, Coherence's Toolbox cloud shell feature empowered Ultralight to run end-to-end tests, securely access their data, and manage scripts. Ultralight also utilized Coherence's secrets integration to ensure secure production deployments.

Conclusion

Through Coherence's comprehensive solution, Ultralight successfully scaled their MVP to a fully operational product, with customers on the path to product-market fit. As their team expanded, Ultralight's software development lifecycle (SDLC) matured, allowing them to maintain sophisticated development practices while keeping pace with their growing business. By leveraging Coherence's capabilities, Ultralight achieved streamlined testing processes, improved software development velocity, and seamless scaling, empowering them to accelerate medical device innovation efficiently and effectively.