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Cloud systems and microservices are becoming powerful tools for businesses. The evidence of the advantages of offering infrastructure, hardware or software as a service (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS) is overwhelming. Microservices and decoupled applications are increasingly popular. These architectures, based on containers, have facilitated the efficient development of complex SaaS applications. A big challenge is to manage and design microservices with a massive range of different facilities, from processing and data storage to computing predictive and prescriptive analytics. Computing providers are mainly based on data centers formed of massive and heterogeneous virtualized systems, which are continuously growing and diversifying over time. Moreover, these systems require integrating into current systems while meeting the Quality of Service (QoS) constraints. The primary purpose of this work is to present an on-premise architecture based on Kubernetes and Docker containers aimed at improving QoS regarding resource usage and service level objectives (SLOs). The main contribution of this proposal is its dynamic autoscaling capabilities to adjust system resources to the current workload while improving QoS.

Introduction Personalised cancer screening aims to improve benefits, reduce harms and being more cost-effective than age-based screening. The objective of the DECIDO study is to assess the acceptability and feasibility of offering risk-based personalised breast cancer screening and its integration in regular clinical practice in a National Health System setting.Methods and analysis The study is designed as a single-arm proof-of-concept trial. The study sample will include 385 women aged 40–50 years resident in a primary care health area in Spain. The study intervention consists of (1) a baseline visit; (2) breast cancer risk estimation; (3) a second visit for risk communication and screening recommendations based on breast cancer risk and (4) a follow-up to obtain the study outcomes.A polygenic risk score (PRS) will be constructed as a composite likelihood ratio of 83 single nucleotide polymorphisms. The Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium risk model, including age, race/ethnicity, family history of breast cancer, benign breast disease and breast density will be used to estimate a preliminary 5-year absolute risk of breast cancer. A Bayesian approach will be used to update this risk with the PRS value.The primary outcome measures will be attitude towards, intention to participate in and satisfaction with personalised breast cancer screening. Secondary outcomes will include the proportions of women who accept to participate and who complete the different phases of the study. The exact binomial and the Student’s t-test will be used to obtain 95% CIs.Ethics and dissemination The study protocol was approved by the Drug Research Ethics Committee of the University Hospital Arnau de Vilanova. The trial will be conducted in compliance with this study protocol, the Declaration of Helsinki and Good Clinical Practice.The results will be published in peer-reviewed scientific journals and disseminated in scientific conferences and media.Trial registration number NCT03791008.

Cloud systems are becoming a powerful tool for business. The evidence of the advantages of offering infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), or software as a service (SaaS) is overwhelming. Therefore, for SaaS providers, it is essential to know the virtual resources required to optimize the service offered and to keep the quality of service (QoS) at the desired levels. This paper presents an analytic model cloud availability and response time (CART) for obtaining the best tradeoff between performance, cost, and availability in a cloud system aimed at providing software as a service. The model aims to guarantee the predetermined availability and response time (RT) agreed with customers in a service-level agreement (SLA) contract while minimizing the cost of the system. A client-transparent error recovery strategy has been considered along with a Poisson traffic model. A sensitivity analysis of the simulated and real workloads is presented to study how a specific SLA influences the cloud service performance regarding the guaranteed RT and availability. The results corroborate the goodness of the model proposed, adjusting the real system accurately. Furthermore, the obtained results provide useful guidelines for cloud or Web-server designers.

Background: With the aim of increasing benefits and decreasing harms, risk-based breast cancer screening has been proposed as an alternative to age-based screening. This study explores barriers and facilitators to implementing a risk-based breast cancer screening program from the perspective of health professionals, in the context of a National Health Service. Methods: Socio-constructivist qualitative research carried out in Catalonia (Spain), in the year 2019. Four discussion groups were conducted, with a total of 29 health professionals from primary care, breast cancer screening programs, hospital breast units, epidemiology units, and clinical specialties. A descriptive-interpretive thematic analysis was performed. Results: Identified barriers included resistance to reducing the number of screening exams for low-risk women; resistance to change for health professionals; difficulties in risk communication; lack of conclusive evidence of the benefits of risk-based screening; limited economic resources; and organizational transformation. Facilitators include benefits of risk-based strategies for high and low-risk women; women's active role in their health care; proximity of women and primary care professionals; experience of health professionals in other screening programs; and greater efficiency of a risk-based screening program. Organizational and administrative changes in the health system, commitment by policy makers, training of health professionals, and educational interventions addressed to the general population will be required. Conclusions: Despite the expressed difficulties, participants supported the implementation of risk-based screening. They highlighted its benefits, especially for women at high risk of breast cancer and those under 50 years of age, and assumed a greater efficiency of the risk-based program compared to the aged-based one. Future studies should assess the efficiency and feasibility of risk-based breast cancer screening for its transfer to clinical practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]