Categories
Azure Cloud Computing Infrastructure

Architecting OpenDental with Microsoft Azure

An interesting story to share before I get to my content proper 😃!

Back in 2018, 9 months into my internship, knowing I would enter the workforce in another 3 months, I was actively on the lookout for job opportunities. Coincidentally, while at a routine checkup at my dental clinic for my braces, my dentist was ranting about how sloppy the work done by their current (at that time) IT vendor were. On top of that, they were charging exorbitant prices for new hardware.

The idea of me helping them revamp their IT infrastructure suddenly came off the top of my head, and the next thing I said was: “I’m in IT, specialising in Information Security”. Thankfully, this seemed to have piqued her interest. Through further conversations, I found out that the clinic was coming off the back of a Ransomware attack, and that operations had to stop for a good 2 weeks before things returned to any form of normalcy.

Therefore, after some more back and forth, she decided to take a chance in me, and trust me as a Consultant to offer her guidance and feedback on providing for Business Continuity Planning (BCP) and Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP).

The most important part of the BCP & DRP was to ensure that clinic operations can start again in the least amount of time in the event of a disaster. This is also known as a lower Recovery Time Objective (RTO). In order to reduce the RTO, I decided to focus my attention to the business critical component that operates the clinic, the Dental Practice Management Software.

Therefore, this is going to be what I’m sharing in this blog post! I’ll talk about my thought process while architecting an IT solution for my dental clinic, and why I decided that going to the Cloud would be a good decision for them.

As with my blog posts, I’m going to split them up into different sections. Navigate through them individually to read through a specific section!

PartDescriptionLink
1OpenDental?Link
2Current State of InfrastructureLink
3Proposed Cloud Computing ApproachLink

Otherwise, join me in my journey by clicking Next!

Categories
Cloud Computing Infrastructure

Amazon Lightsail for Blogs

Hi everyone! Hope everyone’s doing well and staying safe and healthy in this tumultuous period. In my first blog entry, I’m going to talk about how I’ve set up this very blog using Amazon Lightsail! Who knows, maybe one of you may have read this entry and will start creating your own blog as well!

First and foremost, why did I chose Lightsail over the numerous options, including some where I didn’t have to fork out a single cent?

  • I wanted to have control over the infrastructure hosting my site.
  • I wanted it to require as little configuration required as possible.
  • I had an existing domain (nestorlee.com) I wanted to make use of, and possibly extend its usage to other services as well.
  • As cheap as can be!

So that said, I’m going to split this blog entry into 3 parts.

  1. How did I eventually decide on AWS over other providers
  2. How I configured my DNS
  3. How I configure the web service to use HTTPS

So let’s go through how it all comes together!