Case Study: Goldfinch Bio achieves rapid, stable cluster launches and automated Hail AMI management with Navisite

Navisite Helps Biotechnology Company Scale and Automate Operations with AWS AMI Solution

Goldfinch Bio, a venture-backed, clinical-stage biotechnology company developing precision therapeutics for kidney disease, was running large-scale genomic analyses with Hail on Apache Spark and Amazon EMR. Their early Hail deployment was brittle and slow to bootstrap, leading to long-lived clusters, missed Hail updates, and hours or days spent troubleshooting—undermining agility and costing time and money.

Navisite built an automated AMI pipeline using HashiCorp Packer to install Hail and its dependencies and published the AMI for on-demand cluster launches. This reduced bootstrap time from over 45 minutes to about 7–8 minutes, improved stability, enabled rapid, tailored cluster launches, and allowed Goldfinch to focus on innovation while Navisite maintains the Hail environment.

Goldfinch Bio

Adam Tebbe

Senior Director of IT and Informatics