Hello Developers!

Have you ever had to convert HL7v2 messages to FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) and found the process complicated and confusing? InterSystems is rolling out a new cloud based SaaS offering called InterSystems FHIR Transformation Service, which makes the process easy. We are excited to announce an Early Access Preview Program for our new offering, and we would love to have you kick the tires and let us know what you think! All you need is a free AWS account, with an S3 bucket to drop in your HL7v2 messages, and another S3 bucket to get your FHIR output.

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In this article, we’ll build a highly available IRIS configuration using Kubernetes Deployments with distributed persistent storage instead of the “traditional” IRIS mirror pair. This deployment would be able to tolerate infrastructure-related failures, such as node, storage and Availability Zone failures. The described approach greatly reduces the complexity of the deployment at the expense of slightly extended RTO.

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The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud provides a broad set of infrastructure services, such as compute resources, storage options, and networking that are delivered as a utility: on-demand, available in seconds, with pay-as-you-go pricing. New services can be provisioned quickly, without upfront capital expense. This allows enterprises, start-ups, small and medium-sized businesses, and customers in the public sector to access the building blocks they need to respond quickly to changing business requirements.

Updated: 10-Jan, 2023

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Contestant

As an IT and cloud team manager with 18 years of experience with InterSystems technologies, I recently led our team in the transformation of our traditional on-premises ERP system to a cloud-based solution. We embarked on deploying InterSystems IRIS within a Kubernetes environment on AWS EKS, aiming to achieve a scalable, performant, and secure system. Central to this endeavor was the utilization of the AWS Application Load Balancer (ALB) as our ingress controller.

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Enterprises need to grow and manage their global computing infrastructures rapidly and efficiently while simultaneously optimizing and managing capital costs and expenses. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) computing and storage services meet the needs of the most demanding Caché based application by providing
 a highly robust global computing infrastructure.

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Article
· Aug 4, 2021 3m read
IRIS Mirror in the cloud (AWS)

I have been working on redesigning a Health Connect production which runs on a mirrored instance of Healthshare 2019. We were told to take advantage of containers. We got to work on IRIS 2020.1 and split the database part from the Interoperability part. We had the IRIS mirror running on EC2 instances and used containers to run IRIS interoperability application. Eventually we decided to run the data tier in containers as well.

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Article
· Nov 4, 2022 9m read
VIP in AWS

If you're running IRIS in a mirrored configuration for HA in AWS, the question of providing a Mirror VIP (Virtual IP) becomes relevant. Virtual IP offers a way for downstream systems to interact with IRIS using one IP address. Even when a failover happens, downstream systems can reconnect to the same IP address and continue working.

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Article
· May 25, 2023 12m read
AWS Capacity planning review example

I am often asked to review customers' IRIS application performance data to understand if system resources are under or over-provisioned.

This recent example is interesting because it involves an application that has done a "lift and shift" migration of a large IRIS database application to the Cloud. AWS, in this case.

A key takeaway is that once you move to the Cloud, resources can be right-sized over time as needed. You do not have to buy and provision on-premises infrastructure for many years in the future that you expect to grow into.

Continuous monitoring is required. Your application transaction rate will change as your business changes, the application use or the application itself changes. This will change the system resource requirements. Planners should also consider seasonal peaks in activity. Of course, an advantage of the Cloud is resources can be scaled up or down as needed.

For more background information, there are several in-depth posts on AWS and IRIS in the community. A search for "AWS reference" is an excellent place to start. I have also added some helpful links at the end of this post.

AWS services are like Lego blocks, different sizes and shapes can be combined. I have ignored networking, security, and standing up a VPC for this post. I have focused on two of the Lego block components;
- Compute requirements.
- Storage requirements.

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Article
· May 28, 2021 1m read
Fetch Upstream in GitHub

Hi colleagues!

Often when we collaborate to someone's repo in GitHub we do the following cycle:

Fork-Clone-Change-Commit-Push-Pull-Request-Merge to the original repo.

This is all great and works fine!

And if we want to make a second collaboration right after the merge you need to perform "Fetch upstream" to your forked repo first to "ingest" your own Pull-request in the original repo.

Geeky git-professionals do it with ease but this was always a headache for me so I usually simply deleted the fork and created a new one.

And today I figured that Github added a new UI feature that I can easily fetch-upstream for my fork with the original one and make it up to date and capable for pull-requests.

Here is where the button is:

This is a relief! )

Wanted to share this relief and productivity tip with you!

Bring more collaborations to Github repos!

And speaking of PR - I just made a PR with docker to Google Cloud Run deployment for the FHIRaaS demo made by @Anton Umnikov for the current FHIR Contest! Looking for more of your contributions!

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Contestant

Introduction

As the health interoperability landscape expands to include data exchange across on-premise as well as hosted solutions, we are seeing an increased need to integrate with services such as cloud storage. One of the most prolifically used and well supported tools is the NoSQL database DynamoDB (Dynamo), provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

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Article
· Jan 18, 2019 2m read
Free IRIS Community Edition in AWS

Good News!! You can use now the Free InterSystems IRIS Community Edition in the AWS Cloud

Hello,

It's very common that people new in InterSystems IRIS want to start to work in a personal project in a full free environment. If you are one of this, Good News!! You can use now the Free InterSystems IRIS Community Edition in the AWS Cloud.

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Hey Community,

Please join the next InterSystems online programming competition:

🏆 InterSystems FHIR Accelerator Programming Contest 🏆

Submit an application that uses InterSystems FHIR-as-a-service on AWS or helps to develop solutions using InterSystems IRIS FHIR Accelerator.

    Duration: May 10 - June 06, 2021

    Total prize: $8,750

    👉 Landing page 👈

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    For Global Summit 2016, I set out to showcase a Reference Architecture I had been working on for a National Provider Directory solution with State Level Instances and a National Instance all running HealthShare Provider Directory and all running on AWS Infrastructure.

    In short, I wanted to highlight:

    • The implementation of Amazon Web Services to provision the infrastructure, including the auto-creation of the state level instances through Cloud Formation.
    • The use of the HSPD Broadcast functionality to Notify Upstream Systems Changes in Master Provider Data.
    • The implementation of a transformation of the standard Broadcast Object to HL7 MFN for interoperability.
    • The principals of Master Data Management applied to the Provider Directory.

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    Nowadays, most applications are deployed on public cloud services. It brings many advantages including savings in human and material resources, the ability to grow quickly and cheaply, greater availability, reliability, elastic scalability, and options to improve the protection of digital assets. One of the most popular options is AWS. It allows us to deploy our applications usings virtual machines (EC2 service), Docker containers (ECS service), or Kubernetes (EKS service).

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    Hey Developers,

    See how the InterSystems IRIS FHIR Server allows you to develop and deploy your FHIR applications on AWS without manual configuration and deployment:

    Getting Started with the InterSystems IRIS FHIR Server on AWS

    https://www.youtube.com/embed/V6TWgSa69TQ
    [This is an embedded link, but you cannot view embedded content directly on the site because you have declined the cookies necessary to access it. To view embedded content, you would need to accept all cookies in your Cookies Settings]

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    Like hardware hosts, virtual hosts in public and private clouds can develop resource bottlenecks as workloads increase. If you are using and managing InterSystems IRIS instances deployed in public or private clouds, you may have encountered a situation in which addressing performance or other issues requires increasing the capacity of an instance's host (that is, vertically scaling).

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    Most transactional applications have a 70:30 RW profile. However, some special cases have extremely high write IO profiles.

    I ran storage IO tests in the ap-southeast-2 (Sydney) AWS region to simulate IRIS database IO patterns and throughput similar to a very high write rate application.

    The test aimed to determine whether the EC2 instance types and EBS volume types available in the AWS Australian regions will support the high IO rates and throughput required.

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    Being interoperable is more and more important nowadays. InterSystems IRIS 2022.1 comes with a new messaging API to communicate with event streaming platforms like Kafka, AWS SQS/SNS, JMS and RabbitMQ.

    This article shows how you can connect to Kafka and AWS SQS easily.
    We start with a brief discussion of the basic concepts and terms of event streaming platforms.

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    Imagine you want to see what InterSystems can give you in terms of data analytics. You studied the theory and now you want some practice. Fortunately, InterSystems provides a project that contains some good examples: Samples BI. Start with the README file, skipping anything associated with Docker, and go straight to the step-by-step installation. Launch a virtual instance, install IRIS there, follow the instructions for installing Samples BI, and then impress the boss with beautiful charts and tables. So far so good.

    Inevitably, though, you’ll need to make changes.

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    Overview

    Predictable storage IO performance with low latency is vital to provide scalability and reliability for your applications. This set of benchmarks is to inform users of IRIS considering deploying applications in AWS about EBS gp3 volume performance.

    Summary

    • An LVM stripe can increase IOPS and throughput beyond single EBS volume performance limits.
    • An LVM stripe lowers read latency.
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    IRIS can use a KMS (Key Managment Service) as of release 2023.3. Intersystems documentation is a good resource on KMS implementation but does not go into details of the KMS set up on the system, nor provide an easily followable example of how one might set this up for basic testing.

    The purpose of this article is to supplement the docs with a brief explanation of KMS, an example of its use in IRIS, and notes for setup of a testing system on AWS EC2 RedHat Linux system using the AWS KMS. It is assumed in this document that the reader/implementor already has access/knowledge to set up an AWS EC2 Linux system running IRIS (2023.3 or later), and that they have proper authority to access the AWS KMS and AWS IAM (for creating roles and polices), or that they will be able to get this access either on their own or via their organizations Security contact in charge of their AWS access.

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    Last time we deployed a simple IRIS application to the Google Cloud. Now we’re going to deploy the same project to Amazon Web Services using its Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

    We assume you’ve already forked the IRIS project to your own private repository. It’s called <username>/my-objectscript-rest-docker-template in this article. <root_repo_dir> is its root directory.

    Before getting started, install the AWS command-line interface and, for Kubernetes cluster creation, eksctl, a simple CLI utility. For AWS you can try to use aws2, but you’ll need to set aws2 usage in kube config file as described here.

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