Enabling Community Health Care with Microservices

Microservice architectures (MA) are composed of loosely coupled, course-grained services that emphasise resilience and autonomy, enabling more scalable applications to be developed. Such architectures are more tolerant of changing demands from users and enterprises, in response to emerging technologies and their associated influences upon human interaction and behaviour. This article looks at microservices in the Internet of Things (IoT) through the lens of agency, and using an example in the community health care domain explores how a complex application scenario (both in terms of software and hardware interactions) might be modelled

Microservices: Granularity vs. Performance

Microservice Architectures (MA) have the potential to increase the agility of software development. In an era where businesses require software applications to evolve to support software emerging requirements, particularly for Internet of Things (IoT) applications, we examine the issue of microservice granularity and explore its effect upon application latency. Two approaches to microservice deployment are simulated; the first with microservices in a single container, and the second with microservices partitioned across separate containers. We observed a neglibible increase in service latency for the multiple container deployment over a single container.Comment: 6 pages, conferenc

Microservice chatbot architecture for chronic patient support

Chatbots are able to provide support to patients suffering from very different conditions. Patients with chronic diseases or comorbidities could benefit the most from chatbots which can keep track of their condition, provide specific information, encourage adherence to medication, etc. To perform these functions, chatbots need a suitable underlying software architecture. In this paper, we introduce a chatbot architecture for chronic patient support grounded on three pillars: scalability by means of microservices, standard data sharing models through HL7 FHIR and standard conversation modeling using AIML. We also propose an innovative automation mechanism to convert FHIR resources into AIML files, thus facilitating the interaction and data gathering of medical and personal information that ends up in patient health records. To align the way people interact with each other using messaging platforms with the chatbot architecture, we propose these very same channels for the chatbot-patient interaction, paying special attention to security and privacy issues. Finally, we present a monitored-data study performed in different chronic diseases, and we present a prototype implementation tailored for one specific chronic disease, psoriasis, showing how this new architecture allows the change, the addition or the improvement of different parts of the chatbot in a dynamic and flexible way, providing a substantial improvement in the development of chatbots used as virtual assistants for chronic patients

Creating a sustainable digital infrastructure: The role of service-oriented architecture

The United Nations’ goal of generating sustainable industry, innovation, and infrastructure is the point of departure for our reflective paper. The paper elaborates on the concepts of digital infrastructure, service-oriented architecture, and microservices. It emphasizes the benefits and challenges of creating a sustainable infrastructure based on a service-oriented environment, in which cloud services constitute an important part. We outline the prerequisites for obtaining a sustainable digital infrastructure based on services. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and recently, microservice architecture, and cloud services, can provide organizations with the improved agility and flexibility essential for generating sustainability in a market focusing on digitalization. The reuse capability of SOA provides a common pool of information technology (IT) resources and qualifies as a green IT approach that impacts environmental protection. Previous research has identified IT and business alignment together with SOA governance as the most critical criteria when implementing SOA. This paper discusses these issues in-depth to explain sustainability.publishedVersio

Designing and executing digital strategies : completed research paper

The digital economy poses existential threats to — and game-changing opportunities for — companies that were successful in the pre-digital economy. What will distinguish those companies that successfully transform from those that become historical footnotes? This is the question a group of six researchers and consultants from Boston Consulting Group set out to examine. The team conducted in-depth interviews with senior executives at twenty-seven companies in different industries to explore the strategies and organizational initiatives they relied on to seize the opportunities associated with new, readily accessible digital technologies. This paper summarizes findings from this research and offers recommendations to business leaders responsible for digital business success

RADON: Rational decomposition and orchestration for serverless computing

Emerging serverless computing technologies, such as function as a service (FaaS), enable developers to virtualize the internal logic of an application, simplifying the management of cloud-native services and allowing cost savings through billing and scaling at the level of individual functions. Serverless computing is therefore rapidly shifting the attention of software vendors to the challenge of developing cloud applications deployable on FaaS platforms. In this vision paper, we present the research agenda of the RADON project (http://radon-h2020.eu), which aims to develop a model-driven DevOps framework for creating and managing applications based on serverless computing. RADON applications will consist of fine-grained and independent microservices that can efficiently and optimally exploit FaaS and container technologies. Our methodology strives to tackle complexity in designing such applications, including the solution of optimal decomposition, the reuse of serverless functions as well as the abstraction and actuation of event processing chains, while avoiding cloud vendor lock-in through models