Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

forums.aws.amazon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 85 posts

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#51

Post by esrauch »

byoung2 wrote: post #23

We are a monitoring company and are monitoring hundreds of cardiac patients at home. If this is a serious post and there really is a service that monitors cardiac patients from home, first you would have to deal with the unreliability of in-home broadband connections. What if a router needs to be reset, or the DSL goes out? Even if you ignore that, you would expect that any server setup will go down at some time. It…

I could be way off base here since I only know what I saw on the site, but it doesn't look like this is life-or-death monitoring. It looks like its long term monitoring for later review by a doctor. It doesn't seem at all likely that they have someone monitoring the incoming data in realtime for heart attacks, that would be far better suited by hooking up the system to dial 911.

I think some IT person was freaking out that they had downtime and slightly exaggerated the life endangering part, they likely just lost information that may have been used in a future diagnostic manner.

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#52

Post by st0p »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #21
st0p wrote: post #3

That's not even stupid, that is moronic.

Why? Who else would you suggest for providing this type of service? Given the information we had a week ago, I can see how Amazon may have looked like the best solution for HA. Their site never goes down, after all.

Well, first of all if they had used more geographical regions (I don't know what the official amazon buzzword), they shouldn't have real bad problems. I don't know about you, but I believe mission critical systems should be hosted in at least 2 physically different data centers. When it's life critical, this should be a no brainer.

Second of all, according to Amazon PR speak this failure should not be possible. Every person in IT worth their salt should know PR speak is not to be trusted. Being reliant on AWS for your average business app is completely okay though. However, hosting apps which might endanger peoples lives on black box technology over which you have little influence is moronic imo.

Last but not least I seriously question the privacy implications of this. Hosting parts of your medical app in the cloud is fine and I don't know the details of this app, but I wouldn't be happy to know that my medical history is stored by some third party I don't entirely trust with such sensitive data.

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#53

Post by csomar »

troels wrote: post #47
csomar wrote: post #25

Isn't this a good start-up idea? A start-up that backup your website and deploy it to another hosting in case the one you are using is down.

How about a host-abstraction layer, so that you can deal with different providers through a uniform interface?

I'm actually thinking of that. You deploy to the service that take care of deployment, backups and transfer in down times. It would make up of it another kind of hosting company, though.

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#54

Post by dotBen »

zheng wrote: post #50
sliverstorm wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ele…

Could someone who knows better comment on the feasibility of this? It sounds like a really good idea, but I'd imagine it's a bit more difficult than it sounds.

Sure, I'll comment on the feasibility of this: it's a ridiculous idea.

One of the features that allows AWS to scale is that it runs on a unified and consistant hardware platform. Take a look at the recent Google Data Center video or the Facebook Open Server initiative - companies try where possible to run identical hardware for all of their needs as it removes inconsistances in behavior and performance between arbitrarily different pieces of equipment.

So the idea of giving Amazon your own hardware to host is terrible.

The other part of his idea sounds like mirroring servers so that if an EC2 instance goes down, some bare-metal hardware running elsewhere could kick in. That's totally feasible, but no need to do it in the same DC under Amazon's control. Just set up your own machines (bare-metal or virtual) and keep them in sync with your EC2 instance. In the event of EC2 going down you can just change your DNS over to point your fall-back IP or do some clever off-site IP load-balancing tricks (assuming the load balancer hasn't gone down too)

In fact this would have been a good strategy for the ECG monitoring folks if they needed to keep service up even during a prolonged EC2 outage.

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#55

Post by dr_ »

esrauch wrote: post #51
byoung2 wrote: post #23

We are a monitoring company and are monitoring hundreds of cardiac patients at home. If this is a serious post and there really is a service that monitors cardiac patients from home, first you would have to deal with the unreliability of in-home broadband connections. What if a router needs to be reset, or the DSL goes out? Even if you ignore that, you would expect that any server setup will go down at some time. It…

I could be way off base here since I only know what I saw on the site, but it doesn't look like this is life-or-death monitoring. It looks like its long term monitoring for later review by a doctor. It doesn't seem at all likely that they have someone monitoring the incoming data in realtime for heart attacks, that would be far better suited by hooking up the system to dial 911. I think some IT person was freaking ou…

Seems like it was real time monitoring. Otherwise why not just use the traditional Holter monitor, which is later reviewed by a doctor?

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#56

Post by renegadedev »

I recently had the "good" fortune of being at the receiving end of a sales pitch from one cloud hosting service (not Amazon). The pitch centered more around flexibility (ability to add CPUs, RAM, storage, network nodes) rather than reliability issues as the one EC2 is facing right now. All questions about reliability were brushed aside with blanket statements like "it's in the cloud" as if that was an end-all-be-all. After much prodding the sales rep admitted that the hosting was all in one location (low lying hurricane prone area) and if we desired redundancy we would have to mirror our apps at a different geographical location. As with any other product, don't believe the sales pitch. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Always use redundancy specially for critical apps.

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#57

Post by jauer »

forgotAgain wrote: post #45

This is too incredible to be true. But if it is true then I would expect the company in question to be out of business quite soon. A company that put's a life critical system on AWS shows a total disregard for their patients well being.

I've seen things much worse than this with medical records and data.

Up to a few months ago we had a ASP.NET shared hosting customer that was doing some kind of data relay web service for medical imaging. No encryption. Patient data in full view on the server. No redundancy. Apparently it was used for outsourcing imagery review or something. If it didn't work doctors would have to drive in from home which slowed down the diagnostic process.

"Mission critical" on a $30 a month shared hosting plan. Very much not HIPPA compliant.

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#58

Post by sliverstorm »

dotBen wrote: post #54
zheng wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could someone who knows better comment on the feasibility of this? It sounds like a really good idea, but I'd imagine it's a bit more difficult than it sounds.

Sure, I'll comment on the feasibility of this: it's a ridiculous idea. One of the features that allows AWS to scale is that it runs on a unified and consistant hardware platform. Take a look at the recent Google Data Center video or the Facebook Open Server initiative - companies try where possible to run identical hardware for all of their needs as it removes inconsistances in behavior and performance between arbitr…

Haha yea, the 'idea' was kind of a mix between totally crazy and realizable. Mostly just fun to speculate about (and bemusedly wonder if Amazon might be investigating)

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#59

Post by byoung2 »

esrauch wrote: post #51
byoung2 wrote: post #23

We are a monitoring company and are monitoring hundreds of cardiac patients at home. If this is a serious post and there really is a service that monitors cardiac patients from home, first you would have to deal with the unreliability of in-home broadband connections. What if a router needs to be reset, or the DSL goes out? Even if you ignore that, you would expect that any server setup will go down at some time. It…

I could be way off base here since I only know what I saw on the site, but it doesn't look like this is life-or-death monitoring. It looks like its long term monitoring for later review by a doctor. It doesn't seem at all likely that they have someone monitoring the incoming data in realtime for heart attacks, that would be far better suited by hooking up the system to dial 911. I think some IT person was freaking ou…

If that is the case, they should have a local copy of that data at the patient's home, which syncs with the remote server periodically. This would protect against internet connection interruptions. In the event that the remote server is unreachable, it should failover to an alternate server in a different location that is reasonably in sync with the failed server.

Re: Company was hosting cardiac patient monitoring on EC2

#60

Post by _3u10 »

This reminds me of doing tech support back during the dot bomb. Everyday we'd have day traders phone in complaining that their internet was down and they were losing thousands of dollars. Then I'd advise them to switch to their backup connection, then they'd say they didn't have one.

Finally, I'd ask why if they were running a business that could generate / lose thousands of dollars in a few minutes why they had chosen a residential internet service instead of opting for the business package and why they did not have a backup connection as neither the business packages or residential packages came with a SLA that was suitable for the type of risk inherent in their business.

If their data is so important why are they hosting it on the absolute cheapest and shittiest servers they can find without a backup solution in place? If they read the TOS for EC2 it probably says not to run critical infrastructure on it.

Perhaps for sensitive data upon which people's lives depend they might want to look into something like:http://h20223.www2.hp.com/nonstopcomputing/cache/76385-0-0-0...

Yes, it costs more than EC2, but there's a reason for that. Wait until this company finds out that if their values exceed what MySQL expects it will silently truncate it.

Post reply on HN