Healthcare as a Startup

Our AWS Infrastructure

February 4, 2010 at 12:18 pm Justin Wilcox Leave a comment

We make heavy use of Amazon Web Services (AWS) for our hosting, large scale data storage, and load balancing needs.  In fact, the latest release of Breeze leverages AWS’s Auto-Scaling functionality to automatically bring additional servers to life during times of heavy load.

For anyone interested, here’s how:

As records come in for processing, Amazon’s CloudWatch monitors the performance of our processing servers and, once a certain CPU threshold is exceeded, more servers are added to the job.  These new machines are configured to automatically jump in and start lending a hand in the processing.  When all of the charts have been processed, the additional machines are terminated and the system goes back to its normal state.

Obviously, the best part of this system is that we don’t do anything.  The system automatically resizes itself based on load which means we can processes large batches of records at any moment, without having to pay for idling high-end servers 24/7.  Ah, the power of the cloud.

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