Containers, microservices, and HCI help governments in Norway provide safer public data sharing

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

Gardner: What is driving interest in having a common platform for public information in your country?

Sjovatsen: We need interactions between the government and the community to be more efficient. Sowe needed to build the infrastructure that supports automatic solutions for citizens. That’s the main driver.

Gardner: What problems do you need to overcome in order to create a more common approach?

Sjovatsen: One of the biggest issues is [our users] buy business applications such as human resources for school administrators to use and everyone is happy. They have a nice user interface on the data. But when we need to use that data across all the other processes -- that’s where the problem is. And that’s what the FINT project is all about.

[Due to apps heterogeneity] we then need to have developers create application programming interfaces (APIs), and it costs a lot of money, and it is of variable quality. What we’re doing now is creating a common API that’s horizontal -- for all of those business applications. It gives us the ability to use our data much more efficiently.

Gardner: Please describe for us what the FINT project is and why this is so important for public health.

Sjovatsen: It’s all about taking the power back, regarding the information we’ve handed the vendors. There is an initiative in Norway where the government talks about getting control ofallthe information. And the thought behind the FINT project is that we need to get ahold of all the information, describe it, define it, and then make it available via APIs -- both for public use and also for internal use.

Gardner: What sort of information are we dealing with here? Why is it important for the general public health?

Sjovatsen: It’s all kinds of information. For example, it’s school information, such as about how the everyday processes run, the schedules, the grades, and so on. All of that data is necessary to create good services, for the teachers and students. We also want to make that data available so that we can build new innovations from businesses that want to create new and better solutions for us.

Sjovatsen: We needed something that was agile so that we can roll out updates continuously. We also needed a way to roll back quickly, if something fails.

The reason we are running this on one of the county council’s datacenters is we wanted to separate it from their other production environments. We need to be able to scale these services quickly. When we talked to Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), the solution they suggested was using HCI.

Gardner: Where are you in the deployment and what have been some of the benefits of such a hyperconverged approach?

Sjovatsen: We are in the late stage of testing and we’re going into production in early 2018. At the moment, we’re looking into using HPE SimpliVity.

Gardner: Containers are an important part of moving toward automation and simplicity for many people these days. Is that another technology that you are comfortable with and, if so, why?

Sjovatsen: Yes, definitely. We are very comfortable with that. The biggest reason is that when we use containers, we isolate the application; the whole container is the application and we are able to test the code before it goes into production. That’s one of the main drivers.

The second reason is that it’s easy to roll out andit’s easy to roll back. We also have developers in and out of the project, and containers make it easy for them to quickly get in to the environment they are working on. It’s not that much work if they need to install on another computer to get a working environment running.

Gardner: A lot of IT organizations are trying to reduce the amount of money and time they spend on maintaining existing applications, so they can put more emphasis into creating new applications. How do containers, microservices, and API-driven services help you flip from an emphasis on maintenance to an emphasis on innovation?

Gardner: With the success of the FINT Project, would you consider extending this to other types of data and applications in other public sectoractivities or processes? If your success here continues, is this a model that you think has extensibility into other public sectorapplications?

Sjovatsen: Yes, definitely. At the moment, there are 18 county councils in this project. We are just beginning to introduce this to all of the 400 municipalities [in Norway]. So that’s the next step. Those are the same data sets that we want to share or extend. But there are also initiatives with central registers in Norway and we will add value to those using our approach in the next year or so.

Gardner: That could have some very beneficial impacts, very good payoffs.

Sjovatsen: Yes, it could. There are other uses. For example, in Oslo we have made an API extend over the locks on many doors. So, we can now have one API to open multiple locking systems. So that’s another way to use this approach.

Sjovatsen: I definitely recommend it -- it’s simple and agile. The main thing with containers is to separate the storage from the applications. That’s probably what we worked on the most to make it scalable. We wrote the application so it’s scalable, and we separated the data from the presentation layer.