What is RaaS?
RaaS (Rhapsody as a Service) is a managed service platform for deploying and operating the Rhapsody Integration Engine in the cloud.
The Rhapsody Integration Engine
Rhapsody is a healthcare integration engine that connects clinical systems by routing, transforming, and processing healthcare messages (HL7v2, FHIR, CDA, X12, etc.). Hospitals and health organisations use it to move data between their systems — e.g., sending lab results from the LIS to the EMR.
What RaaS adds
RaaS wraps Rhapsody in a fully managed AWS infrastructure layer:
- Automated provisioning — Terraform + Ansible deploy the full stack (VPC, EC2, S3, IAM, VPN)
- Multi-tenant isolation — Each customer gets their own AWS account
- Managed connectivity — Site-to-site VPNs, HSCN connections, Direct Connect
- Monitoring & alerting — Coralogix dashboards, PagerDuty on-call
- Certificate management — Centralised cert expiry monitoring across all accounts
- Deployment pipeline — Ansible Tower + GitHub Actions for Rhapsody upgrades and config changes
UK & HSCN context
UK customers connect to Rhapsody via HSCN (Health & Social Care Network) — a private WAN for NHS and health organisations. This adds:
- StrongSwan VPN tunnels through a transit gateway
- Redcentric as the HSCN network provider
- Compliance requirements around data handling and network security
The UK/HSCN variant is the most operationally complex RaaS deployment type — which is why this guide exists.
Key repos
| Repo | Purpose |
|---|---|
raas-deploy-raas |
Main AWS deployment — Ansible + CloudFormation |
raas-hscn-connection-stack |
HSCN Terraform + VPN config |
raas-aws-environment |
AWS account registry (account.csv) |
raas-azure-terraform-v2 |
Azure Terraform modules |
raas-azure-customer-configs |
Customer YAML configs → tfvars + Ansible |