Introduction

The National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS) Base System (NBS) is a CDC-developed disease surveillance system that health departments use to manage reportable disease data. NBS 7 is the modernized version of the platform, designed for deployment and operation on cloud-based infrastructure. This documentation supports the administration lifecycle for NBS 7, including planning, deployment, validation, and maintenance.


Purpose and scope

The NBS 7 System Administration guide helps you prepare for NBS 7, deploy the platform, validate that it is working correctly, and maintain it over time. It brings together operational guidance for system administration tasks across the NBS 7 lifecycle.

The content is centered on system administration. It covers readiness and planning work before deployment, phased deployment guidance for NBS 7 infrastructure and services, and maintenance topics for operating environments after go-live.

Runtime environment support

NBS 7 supports AWS and Azure as runtime options. The platform uses a cloud-agnostic approach, and the deployment content includes guidance for both supported providers. NBS 7 runs on Kubernetes and relies on tools such as Terraform and Helm to provision and manage infrastructure and services.

Intended audience

The primary audience is system administrators at state, tribal, local, and territorial health departments who install, operate, and maintain NBS 7. The content assumes familiarity with your cloud platform, Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, and related administration tasks. You need administrator-level access to your runtime environment and a local system with required prerequisites installed.

For more information on NBS, see the official CDC National Electronic Disease Surveillance System Base System (NBS) website.

Revision history

Date Description Author
April 17, 2026 Full site restructure Jill Shaheen (Skylight Digital)
August 19, 2025 7.11.0 Minor Release Anand Logan, Upasana Pattnaik, Kashyap Ramakur, Aaron Chapman, Duc Nguyen, Chuck Moss, Serban Zamfir