Key Terminology
A glossary of terms you'll encounter frequently in RaaS operations.
Infrastructure Terms
| Term |
Definition |
| RaaS |
Rhapsody as a Service — the managed cloud platform for Rhapsody |
| HSCN |
Health & Social Care Network — UK private WAN for NHS organisations |
| devops_env |
Infrastructure lifecycle environment: sandbox1–sandbox4 (dev/test) or prod (stable) |
| TARGET_RAAS_ENV |
Application environment running on the infra: prod, nonprod, or all |
| customer_code |
Short identifier for a customer (e.g., uk, lincolnshire, westherts) |
| Transit Gateway |
AWS networking hub that connects VPCs and VPN tunnels |
| StrongSwan |
Open-source IPsec VPN software used for HSCN VPN tunnels |
| Redcentric |
UK ISP that provides HSCN network connectivity |
AWS Services
| Term |
Definition |
| EC2 |
Elastic Compute Cloud — virtual machines running Rhapsody |
| VPC |
Virtual Private Cloud — isolated network per customer |
| S3 |
Simple Storage Service — object storage for backups, logs, configs |
| IAM |
Identity and Access Management — permissions and roles |
| SSM |
Systems Manager — remote management of EC2 instances |
| SES |
Simple Email Service — customer SMTP relay |
| Route53 |
DNS management |
| CloudFormation |
Infrastructure as Code (AWS-native) |
| Term |
Definition |
| Ansible Tower |
Web UI for running Ansible playbooks against customer infrastructure |
| Terraform |
Infrastructure as Code tool (HashiCorp) — used for Azure and some AWS |
| Coralogix |
Log management and monitoring platform |
| PagerDuty |
Incident alerting and on-call scheduling |
| Cognito |
AWS authentication service — used for internal dashboards |
Networking
| Term |
Definition |
| CIDR |
Classless Inter-Domain Routing — IP address range notation (e.g., 10.0.0.0/16) |
| VPN |
Virtual Private Network — encrypted tunnel between networks |
| Direct Connect |
AWS dedicated network connection (physical circuit) |
| NACL |
Network Access Control List — subnet-level firewall rules |
| Security Group |
Instance-level firewall rules (stateful) |
| Peering |
Direct network connection between two VPCs/VNets |