iSpecimen worked with Privo to design a Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) hosted at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Due to the type of data iSpecimen handles on a daily basis, they needed a hosting provider that would be able to meet all the security and compliance requirements dictated by HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. They also needed a hosting provider that provided them with the tools and services to help their application scale. Privo was able to architect a secure, highly available environment using Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Elastic Load Balancer (ELB), Simple Storage Service (S3), and Relational Database Services (RDS). “The infrastructure has had 100% uptime since the beginning. That has been critical to earning the trust of our early customers,’ said Doug Williams.
By choosing AWS and Privo, iSpecimen was able to focus on the development of their application and leave the heavy lifting of managing the infrastructure and security to AWS and Privo. iSpecimen’s application now resides in a secure VPC deployed across several AWS Availability Zones (AZ). The application consists of public facing ELBs that terminate SSL requests, and serve traffic to secure web servers running on Linux EC2 instances. The web servers use a highly available RDS instance that spans 2 AZs, in addition to several read replica instances. Partners in iSpecimen’s network upload data to S3 where the data is stored for processing. Once the specimens have been processed, the data is then archived to AWS’ Glacier service for long-term, cost effective archival storage.
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The life sciences applications ported to AWS using the infrastructure-as-code solution included PSILO, from Chemical Computing Group, and FEP+, a workflow/ algorithm implemented in Schrödinger’s software suite. Privo had to de-couple the applications from their databases prior to migration. Now the applications can be redeployed in a matter of minutes in case of a problem.
New applications and configurations can now be tested with much greater ease and flexibility, allowing scientists to spin up new infrastructure and destroy it when no longer needed. This makes it much less expensive--both in terms of time and money--to experiment with new workflows and allows H3 scientists to do more of their groundbreaking work.
“The support from Privo’s AWS team has really enabled iSpecimen to continue innovating, spending more of our time on product development and less time worrying about keeping the lights on. Privo has been instrumental in helping us get the most out of AWS. Their support team has really helped us to optimize the performance, security, and availability of our application by leveraging automation, helping us eliminate any single points of failure.”
- Doug Williams, CTO iSpecimen
Privo is a Premier AWS Consulting Partner with offices located in Boston and San Francisco we help customers migrate, manage, and optimize their infrastructure in AWS. Privo delivers these services across three main practice groups: DevOps, End User Computing, and AWS Cost Optimization.
AWS allows you to have an agile, costeffective, and scalable infrastructure to enable operational efficiency, and simplify access to applications for end users. With AWS, companies of all sizes can focus more on their core business instead of IT administration.
Learn more about how Privo and AWS can revolutionize your IT
Privo is an AWS consulting firm with offices near Boston and San Francisco. We have about 45-ish people, all AWS engineers save for a brave few. There are a few things that make us different, but it boils down to this: we hire smart people who love working with others to solve complex problems. We employ the best people you’ll never hire.
Boston Office
400 West Cummings Park, Suite 3250
Woburn MA 01801
San Francisco Office
2120 University Ave
Berkeley, CA 94704
