The Orthweb project helps imaging IT staff build an Orthanc solution on AWS. This page is the overview of the project. For step-by-step instructions and architectural discussions, follow to the documentation.
Orthanc must operate on a secure cloud platform. Typically, large organizations can afford dedicated IT resources to build their enterprise-scale cloud foundation on AWS. This foundation is known as a landing zone. Each department in the organization deploys their own applications on their assigned segment of network landing zone.
In reality, many Orthanc adopters are smaller entities such as startups, research facilities, independent health facilities, or departments without a organizational cloud strategy. These adopters needs a secure and scalable cloud foundation to leverage the power of Orthanc. To fill this gap, Orthweb project was created to accelerate deployment of Orthanc in public cloud.
The Orthweb template provisions its own self-contained infrastrcture stack in a single AWS account. It does not rely upon an established network infrastructure platform. The network infrastructure layer provisioned in this project contains a single VPC with multiple subnets, along with required endpoints. The infrastructure layer also contains encryption keys, managed database service and S3 storage. The infrastrcture footprint is small but secure. It aims to comply with regulatory requirements such as HIPPA. However, regulatory auditing is the responsibility of the Orthanc adopter.
The Orthweb project uses Terraform for infrastructure as code. It leverages cloud-init user data to initialize the servers. The configuration to install Orthanc is stored in the orthanc-config repository. Bring your own AWS account, let Orthweb set up an Orthanc server within 30 minutes, and start to serve HTTP and DICOM traffic. The project also takes into account other operational aspects, such as high availability, resiliency and automation in the configuration of Orthanc application with Docker, using the official Orthanc image. For those considering hosting Orthanc on Kubernetes, check out our sister project Korthweb.
