Housed in the College of Medicine at the University of South Alabama (USA), the Center for Strategic Health Innovation (CSHI) is a nationally recognized leader in innovative healthcare technology applications and the development and deployment of healthcare technology platforms, as well as the delivery of advanced preparedness teaching and training. CSHI’s cornerstone system is RMEDE™, the Real Time Medical Electronic Data Exchange, an industry-leading program that features predictive analytics capability, customizable ad hoc reporting, and is a world-class data warehouse architecture and business intelligence platform. CSHI was able to decrease its infrastructure costs by 40-50%. Their application is now running … Read More
Selecting the Best Cloud Option for an Oracle E-Business Suite Migration
A nation-wide professional services company was running an on-prem version of Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) Financials and Projects and needed an unbiased evaluation as their hardware aged, support costs began to increase as relative performance decreased. Like many other companies, they began to explore moving to the cloud, but they were unsure how to choose from the wide range of cloud options with licensing and compliance implications to consider. Our team evaluated hosting Oracle EBS on AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). After careful evaluation, OCI provided the best combination of low total cost of ownership, flexibility, and … Read More
Growing Orthopedic Institute Gains Modernization, Security, and Flexibility through Migrating to the AWS Cloud
The Orthopaedic Institute of Ohio (OIO) faced the challenge of refreshing legacy hardware while planning for the increase in capacity of several upcoming acquisitions. To solve these challenges, OIO asked M&S Consulting to evaluate and create a strategy for its cloud alternative. We recommended Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a good fit for their needs and provided a strategy that would migrate over 90% of their servers to the cloud. The primary business applications for OIO are Patient Electronic Medical Records and Imaging solutions which are vital to the success of treatment. To support migrations, we created a set of … Read More
Lambda Functions with Newer Version of boto3 than Available by Default
During development of an AWS Lambda function utilizing the recently released AWS Cost Explorer API, the latest version of boto3 and botocore was discovered to be unavailable in the Lambda execution environment. The Lambda execution environment supported version of an AWS SDK can lag behind the latest release found on GitHub, which can cause supportability issues when writing Lambda code attempting to use the most recently added features of AWS SDKs. This blog post will explore using boto3 1.4.8 and botocore 1.8.0 despite (at the time of this writing) the Lambda execution environment defaulting to boto3 1.4.7 and botocore 1.7.37. This … Read More
VMware hosted on AWS?
Some exciting news came out of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and VMware last year with the announcement of VMware Cloud on AWS. VMware has been the bedrock of enterprise virtualization and the leading software-as-a-datacenter for years. AWS presented the world with a new way to think about datacenters and quickly became a leader in cloud computing. A limiting factor in using AWS was the vast differences in how AWS and VMware worked to accomplish similar tasks. You will find the same buzz words, such as snapshots, but not the same actions from them. This has presented the industry with a … Read More
Automatically install software to your new AWS EC2 instances
When creating an AWS EC2 instance, you can configure a startup script or list of commands to be automatically executed. The commands are performed immediately following initialization and the process allows you to start multiple configured instances. This saves time by having programs install themselves before you have ever even needed to log in. The Advanced Details section in Step 6 of creating a new EC2 instance in the AWS dashboard provides a text area to enter all commands. The example in the photo shows some commands to update and install MySQL Database on an enterprise Linux instance. This allows a user to have access to an … Read More
Compatibility of AWS EC2 API Actions and IAM Policy Resource-Level Permissions
In this blog post I will examine how partial implementation of a feature of IAM policies: resource-level permissions interacts with AWS EC2 API actions to produce confusing results. Please note that AWS states in its documentation that it is planning on expanding the compatibility of resource-level permissions, so check the links at the bottom of this post for the most up-to-date information. Below is a short python program (troubleshooting.py) that utilizes the ec2:DescribeVolumes action. As you can see, I have omitted the access/secret key pair. If you wish to use this code, simply insert your access/secret key you obtained from the IAM … Read More