Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2 • Hacker News Board

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#11

Post by MichaelApproved » Sat, Apr 23, 2011, 7:54 PM UTC

I hope no one dies because of this. Yet, the sad part is, it'll take someones death to get serious attention and help prevent this stupidity in the future.

Of course, then things will swing wildly in the other direction with massive legislation and regulation thats designed to get a lawmaker reelected more than it is to save lives.

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#12

Post by beck5 » Sat, Apr 23, 2011, 7:55 PM UTC

This is the sort of service which should have a back up, its not reddit.

If it can go wrong it will go wrong.

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#13

Post by gte910h » Sat, Apr 23, 2011, 7:55 PM UTC

I see EC2 as a good piece of infrastructre to have as part of a failover plan. But should it be even 1/3 the providers for servers? No.

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#14

Post by MichaelApproved » Sat, Apr 23, 2011, 7:56 PM UTC

chrisjsmith wrote: post #9

Epic fail for the company which is hosting on their kit. Whoever threw it on there is a total dick. There is nothing wrong with EC2 here. It's just not the right tool for the job. If they are monitoring cardiac patients, they should, at least for non-critical people, have the instrumentation cache the data and send when available over leased lines. If it is critical, it should be PROPER HARDWARE attached to the POTS…

Ec2 is fine here. All systems have downtime. Its not having a backup system in place that's the problem.

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#15

Post by zaidf » Sat, Apr 23, 2011, 7:56 PM UTC

This is where you wish you had a data center address and a cabinet number where you could pop in, grab your servers and move the heck out to another DC.

I wonder if this will get more companies to maintain a non-cloud, vanilla setup on some dedicated or collocated boxes.

May be we should have an annual day to bring down our primary servers and see how the backups do. The idea shouldn't be to confirm if everything works or not. It should be to determine what did work and did not work.

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#16

Post by zaidf » Sat, Apr 23, 2011, 7:58 PM UTC

sliverstorm wrote: post #5

Hmm... That would rather seem to be the monitoring company's own fault. Admittedly I haven't used ec2 for about 3 years, but I seem to recall there being an explicit disclaimer about how it wasn't supposed to be used for this kind of uptime-critical application. I want to say it even specifically mentioned medical stuff.

Agree. I'd avoid cloud for half as critical apps where I cannot CLEARLY picture where my servers are in a physical sense and how I can physically get a hold of them if shit hits the fan.

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#17

Post by protomyth » Sat, Apr 23, 2011, 7:59 PM UTC

I really hope this is someone's idea of a joke, but the nature of this person's other questions tends to make me believe no.

Sometime during the last couple of days, a lawyer was getting a lecture from IT on how the system works and is going to have a very, very bad year.

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#18

Post by kierank » Sat, Apr 23, 2011, 7:59 PM UTC

blantonl wrote: post #2

Actual quote in the Amazon support forums from this company: " This not just some social network website issue, but a serious threat to peoples lives! "

I have a feeling (and I really really hope) this is a joke because of that sentence.

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#19

Post by sliverstorm » Sat, Apr 23, 2011, 7:59 PM UTC

zaidf wrote: post #15

This is where you wish you had a data center address and a cabinet number where you could pop in, grab your servers and move the heck out to another DC. I wonder if this will get more companies to maintain a non-cloud, vanilla setup on some dedicated or collocated boxes. May be we should have an annual day to bring down our primary servers and see how the backups do. The idea shouldn't be to confirm if everything wor…

You know, that gets me thinking- wouldn't it be pretty damn slick if Amazon offered a way to plug your own hardware into the greater EC2 cluster remotely, so that if Big EC2 goes down, you still have copies of your machines running locally?

Maybe you could even timeshare your machines out for some other instances for a discount on your service, similar to how you can send solar power back up the power grid for an electricity credit. Then ec2 really WOULD be a cloud!

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#20

Post by kapitalx » Sat, Apr 23, 2011, 8:00 PM UTC

chrisjsmith wrote: post #9

Epic fail for the company which is hosting on their kit. Whoever threw it on there is a total dick. There is nothing wrong with EC2 here. It's just not the right tool for the job. If they are monitoring cardiac patients, they should, at least for non-critical people, have the instrumentation cache the data and send when available over leased lines. If it is critical, it should be PROPER HARDWARE attached to the POTS…

I wonder if they have the device connected through wifi to the patient's internet connection. I'm sure EC2 is not their only possible point of failure.