Containerized versus Virtualization

Mirth® Connect by NextGen Healthcare can be run using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). The Azure Kubernetes Service is a managed service which takes care of the availability of your underlying clusters, auto scaling, or patching your underlying VM. The benefit of using containers can be quickly deployed as it does not require loading of the underlying OS. The disk space used is smaller as it only requires the space to run the application (Mirth® Connect by NextGen Healthcare and does not require space for the underlying OS.

The benefit of running a VM is that it is able to be scalable vertically. With AKS, scaling is done only horizontally using the Cluster autoscaler.

Mirth® Connect by NextGen Healthcare upgrades are more complex with containerization. The container image will need to be updated with the upgrade of the Mirth® Connect by NextGen Healthcare application. The NextGen support team will not be able to update container images with the updated Mirth® Connect by NextGen Healthcare The responsibility of maintaining the container image will fall to the client. Upgrades with a traditional VM running Mirth® Connect by NextGen Healthcareis easier to perform and can be done by the NextGen support team.