20111116devoxxgoingextremeforhealthcare 111124045944-phpapp01

Going Extreme for Health Care

Koen Vanderkimpen @koenvdk

Dirk Deridder @dirkderidder

When Security, Performance, Scalability, and Availability all want to be the star of the show

4/02/2013

Smals

2

Dirk Deridder

Koen Vanderkimpen

Preferred ICT Partner of Social Security and Health Care Institutions in Belgium

Smals Research Team

Dedicated to introducing innovative IT in e-Government And solving clients' more abstract problems

1.5 years @ Smals, specializing in OO, software develop- ment, version control; implemented first demo of the PCS

1 year @ Smals, specializing in dynamic programming languages, software architecture, Agile and XTP

4/02/2013

3

What Follows

1. The Project: which challenges?

2. Security: Novel Approach using threshold encryption

3. Conflicting Challenges in a High-Risk Project

4. Extreme Transaction Processing

5. Conclusions

6. Questions

4/02/2013

4

Mission:

« Build a highly secure platform to exchange Patient Data between Healthcare actors within

Flanders/Be/EU/… »

1. The Project: A Primary Care Safe (PCS)

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The "PCS manifesto":

• Security, Privacy, Confidentiality

• 24/7 always-on

• Generic, Multi-Purpose, Shared

Thoroughly Patient-Centric Vision

• Ready for Growing Data & Usage

• Performant (4s response time)

Some NFR's…

4/02/2013

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Functionality

• PUT

(a file, or part of it)

• GET

• DELETE

Patient File

Medication

Parameters

Allergies

Journal

…

Anti-Diabetical

Anti-Aids

Blood Pressure

Heart Condition

Other

Pulse

Entries

Entry1

Entry2 …

(Versioning)

(Fine-Grained DataModel)

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(for Flanders)

• Patients: 6.5 million

• Users (medical professionals): 51000

• File accesses per day/user: 7.2

• Starting file size: 50K (towards 5M)

Some Figures

What if?

• All of Belgium joins in?

• Patients get access?

• Mobile usage develops?

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2. PCS – Novel Security Architecture

• "end-user eyes only"

• "distributed trust"

File

(Only Encrypted Messages)

Alice Bob

PCS Dokters Org Gov (ehealth)

host & control control

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Symmetric Encryption

Message

Secret key Encrypted Message

Alice Bob

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Assymmetric Encryption (Public Key)

Public Key Private Key

= +

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Primary Care Safe - PCS

Bob

PCS

Dokters.Org

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Threshold Encryption (Public Key)

• Main Idea: a minimum number (= the threshold) of people needed to decrypt

1

2

1

2 Public Key

Bob

Marc

Alice

Partial Decryption

Combination

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Primary Care Safe - PCS

Dr. Bob

PCS Dokters Org Gov (ehealth)

1

2

1 2

1

2

Patent Pending!

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Fine-Grained Access Control

Patient File

Medication

Parameters

Allergies

Journal

…

Anti-Diabetical

Anti-Aids

Blood Pressure

Heart Condition

Other

Pulse

Entries

Entry1

Entry2 …

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• Exchange Platform for Medical Data

• Eventually for 6500000 patients (all of Flanders) – A few 1000 to start

Growing data (e.g. lifetime biometrics)

• For many different applications

• Provided by the Government

• Security + Fine-grained Access

3. Roundup: Primary Care Safe (PCS)

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• Exchange Platform for Medical Data

• Eventually for 6500000 patients (all of Flanders) – A few 1000 to start

Growing data (e.g. lifetime biometrics)

• For many different applications

• Provided by the Government

• Security + Fine-grained Access

Availability

4/02/2013

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• Exchange Platform for Medical Data

• Eventually for 6500000 patients (all of Flanders) – A few 1000 to start

Growing data (e.g. lifetime biometrics)

• For many different applications

• Provided by the Government

• Security + Fine-grained Access

Availability

Scalability

4/02/2013

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• Exchange Platform for Medical Data

• Eventually for 6500000 patients (all of Flanders) – A few 1000 to start

Growing data (e.g. lifetime biometrics)

• For many different applications

• Provided by the Government

• Security + Fine-grained Access

Availability

Scalability

Flexibility

4/02/2013

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• Exchange Platform for Medical Data

• Eventually for 6500000 patients (all of Flanders) – A few 1000 to start

Growing data (e.g. lifetime biometrics)

• For many different applications

• Provided by the Government

• Security + Fine-grained Access

Availability

Scalability

Flexibility Security

4/02/2013

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• Exchange Platform for Medical Data

• Eventually for 6500000 patients (all of Flanders) – A few 1000 to start

Growing data (e.g. lifetime biometrics)

• For many different applications

• Provided by the Government

• Security + Fine-grained Access

Availability

Scalability Performance

Flexibility Security

4/02/2013

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Security

Availability

Scalability Performance

Flexibility

Challenge: Reconciling the NFR's

4/02/2013

4. How to approach this?

• Programming language?

Java @ Smals

• Software Architecture?

N-Tier & SOA @ Smals

• Development approach?

EUP @ Smals

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? Will this work

Sure, but more geared towards « conventional » projects

Actually we weren’t « sure » so we investigated further …

4/02/2013

XTP versus Traditional N-Tier Solution?

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Business Processing Tier

Web Tier

Load Balancer

Database Tier

Messaging Tier

4/02/2013

Looking for inspiration…

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• Social Media

• Stock exchange

• Investment banks

• Telecommunications

• Retail Business

• Web-commerce

• Internet media

• Factory automation

• Aerospace industry

• Online gaming

• Big Data analysis

• …

• Large number of users • High volume of requests • Very demanding availability (24/7) • Peak loads are a moving target • Challenging performance expectation • …

Some of our NFR’s are « easy » compared to their day-2-day operation

4/02/2013

Extreme Transaction Processing

« An application style aimed at supporting

the design, development, deployment,

management and maintenance of

distributed TP applications

characterized by exceptionally demanding

performance, scalability, availability,

security, manageability,

and dependability requirements »

Everything we need « in a box »? 25

4/02/2013

Let’s get this « XTP solution in-a-box »!

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Big XTP Box Bang!

Hypertable

BigTable

NoSQL

DevOps

MongoDB

MemcacheDB

Cassandra

CouchDB

Voldemort

Map/Reduce

Hadoop

Grid Computing

Space Based Architecture

Event Driven Architecture

Shared Nothing Architecture

Partitioning Terracotta Akka

Erlang

Actor Model

Scala

AmbientTalk

Node.js

…

Async Flows

In-memory DB Master/Worker

Task Execution

4/02/2013

Today’s main focus: Support offered by an XTP middleware Platform

• Several solutions exist MaatG G Platform, GigaSpaces XAP, Appistry, Tibco

ActiveSpaces, Paremus Service Fabric, …

• Currently establishing a position as CEAP’s / EAP’s Good match with « cloud » requirements

Fine-grained elastic scalability, Continuous availability & Non-stop operations Consistent performance

Still require additional work on multitenancy, billing, self provisioning, … Not intrinsic to XTP (can be enablers)

Traditional application servers will not meet future needs to move to the cloud « … dinosaurs tiptoeing through a meteor storm… »

[M. Gualtieri, Forrester 2011]

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4/02/2013

XTP Platform characteristics enabling Extreme Availability

• Let it crash principle • Zero downtime failover management

Automated failover without side-effects E.g., handover from primary to backup with no manual intervention,

even between datacenters

Automated self-healing without side-effects E.g., creation of new backup nodes after failover with no manual

intervention

Automated replication management E.g., keeping primaries/backups consistent, redo queues, …

• Transparent for client applications The client is unaware of « who » handles the request and is only

interested in getting a result Shield-off all complexity involved in guaranteeing high availability

• Application virtualisation and overall automation are key!

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4/02/2013

XTP Platform characteristics enabling Extreme Performance

• Improve response time by not moving data around Focus on data/processing affinity

Routing of requests to the location of the data Do not separate tiers physically

Work with an in-memory data grid Cf. caching, but not as an after-the-fact optimisation strategy Persistency as a service, not involved in servicing live requests

• Increase throughput Asynchronous processing flows

Give back control asap Make requests self-contained so they can

served by any « workers » that are available

Work with a processing grid Execute (parts of) requests in « parallel » Avoid relying on external systems Enforce strict internal / external SLA’s

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4/02/2013

XTP Platform characteristics enabling Extreme Scalability

• Principle of horizontal scaling Increase capacity by adding resources « on the fly » in an

automated fashion Elastic scaling, so capacity can be taken away easily Location-unaware applications

Transparent for client applications as well

Capacity planning vs capacity management

• Application virtualisation and overall automation are key!

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HORIZONTAL SCALING

VER

TIC

AL

SC

ALIN

G

4/02/2013

Concrete XTP Platform XAP: Characteristics

• Space Based Architecture Based on Tuple Spaces [Gelernter & Carriero]

Cf JavaSpaces, but a lot more

Technology arena: Java, Jini, JMS, Spring, Hibernate, …

Data + Processing+ Messaging Grids

• SLA-driven application containers • Excellent enabler for implementing XTP

architectures Allowing you to focus on the « difficult part » by

taking care of the « hard part »

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4/02/2013

Server

Program

Memory

Server

Program

Memory

Space Based Architecture

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4/02/2013

Server

Program

Memory

Space Based Architecture

35

Server

Space

Program

Memory

4/02/2013

Server

Program

Memory

Processing Unit

Processing Unit

Space

Program

Memory

Program

Memory

Space Based Architecture

36

4/02/2013

Server

Program

Memory

Server

Server

Processing Unit

Processing Unit

Space

Program

Memory

Program

Memory

Space Based Architecture

37

4/02/2013

Server

Program

Memory

Server

Server

Server

Processing Unit

Processing Unit

Processing Unit

Space

Program

Memory

Program

Memory

Program

Memory

Space Based Architecture

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4/02/2013

Server

Program

Memory

Server

Server

Server

Processing Unit

Processing Unit

Processing Unit

Space

Program

Memory

Program

Memory

Program

Memory

Space Based Architecture

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4/02/2013

Server

Program

Memory

Server

Server

Processing Unit

Processing Unit

Processing Unit

Space

Program

Memory

Program

Memory

Program

Memory

Space Based Architecture

40

4/02/2013

Server

Program

Memory

Server

Server

Server

Processing Unit

Processing Unit

Processing Unit

Space

Program

Memory

Program

Memory

Program

Memory

Space Based Architecture

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Lots of flexibility and support « out of the box » for realizing an(y) XTP solution

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XTP versus Traditional N-Tier Solution?

Business Processing Units

(Data + Processing + Messaging)

A B C

A B C

A B C

Web Processing

Units

Load Balancer

Database

4/02/2013

Conclusions

• XTP is not just a technology or style of programming Impacts software architecture, development process, … An integrated approach / vision is required! Having an XTP platform is only a first step Think outside the traditional box

• Demands disciplined application of development practices Not only functional testing: NFR’s ! Automation is fundamental

• Updating applications with no downtime is an additional challenge Requires « next-release strategy » XTP platforms provide « patterns » to handle this

• Problems can still happen, be prepared! Cf. Recent Amazon / Microsoft /… outages (if the best fail, expect…)

• ROI analysis is absolutely necessary Not every application calls for a platinum-approach

But it never hurts to think about it !

Maximum ROI = Availability + Scalability + Performance

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4/02/2013

Going Extreme for Health Care

Koen Vanderkimpen @koenvdk

Dirk Deridder @dirkderidder

When Security, Performance, Scalability, and Availability all want to be the star of the show

Q&A