On Cloud Strategies. Q&A with Steve LeBlanc
Q1. What are the typical performance requirements of mission-critical applications, such as financial trading platforms and electronic medical record systems, to name a few?
Today’s technology-driven industries move at increasingly accelerated rates. This is especially true for the healthcare and finance industries where mass amounts of data are being created every day and accurate decisions must be made in a matter of seconds or milliseconds. For mission-critical applications such as electronic medical records or financial trading platforms, having an infrastructure in place that supports scalability, agility, speed and security are pivotal to deploying a high-performing solution that can handle these mass amounts of data. If organizations don’t have the right infrastructure in place to appropriately handle their data and support these capabilities in a timely and organized fashion, they risk everything from missed insights and inaccurate outcomes to application outages.
Q2. What are AWS Graviton2-based Amazon EC2 M6g instances?
AWS Graviton processors are custom built by Amazon Web Services, and Graviton2 is the second-generation ARM-based processor associated with the Amazon EC2 M6g instance type. This instance type provides up to 40% better price performance over similar M5 instances, which gives developers significant economic and scalability advantages when building and deploying data and analytics intensive services.
Q3. What are the benefits in supporting the new processor?
The support of AWS Graviton2 provides enhanced technology and architecture freedom for InterSystems developers, while increasing application performance and lowering costs for cloud-based workloads. This enables organizations to advance their cloud strategies while keeping in mind what’s most important (increased performance and reduced cost).
Q4. Do you have any results to share for your benchmarking InterSystems IRIS, with the new AWS Graviton2-based Amazon E M6g instances?
In benchmarks with InterSystems IRIS, the new AWS Graviton2-based Amazon EC2 M6g instances offered up to 28% higher performance at a 20% lower infrastructure cost compared with similar-sized instances.
Q5. What is your practical advice to organizations to advance their cloud strategies?
Educate yourself. Cloud enables flexibility and freedom of choice unseen in an on-premises environment. What used to take weeks of procurement and days of installation, such as upgrading your hardware and increasing storage volumes, now takes minutes with a few clicks or lines of code in the cloud. But this flexibility and power comes with responsibility. High availability, security, integration and day-to-day operations might look completely different in the cloud. To utilize the full potential of the cloud you must learn and understand many new concepts such as object storage, autoscaling, VPCs, availability zones – just to name a few. While some may approach the cloud with a “lift and shift” mindset, the cloud offers tremendous flexibility to decompose monolith applications into sets of individual services that can be orchestrated and elastically scaled independently as needed. These approaches can allow organizations to become far more flexible and agile, while reducing infrastructure costs.
Q6. Do you have guidelines available for customers interested in testing InterSystems IRIS and InterSystems IRIS for Health on AWS Graviton2-based Amazon EC2 M6g instances?
Customers interested in testing InterSystems IRIS and InterSystems IRIS for Health on AWS Graviton2-based Amazon EC2 M6g instances can access step-by-step instructions on the InterSystems Developer Community.
Steve LeBlanc is a product specialist on the Cloud Team at InterSystems, focused on both strategy and technology to enable InterSystems IRIS solutions in the cloud. He has 12 years of experience as a sales engineer and support specialist at InterSystems. He studied Computer Science at Tufts University, and received his MBA from Questrom School of Business at Boston University.
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