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Digital technologies, such as Big Data analytics, artificial intelligence, cloud and high-performance computing are presenting new opportunities to transform healthcare systems, increase connectivity of hospitals and other providers, and therefore potentially and significantly improve patient care. However, such networked computing infrastructures also raise significant cybersecurity risks, especially in the healthcare domain, where protecting sensitive personal information is of paramount importance. Project ASCLEPIOS aims at strengthening the trust of users in cloud-based healthcare services by utilizing trusted execution environment and several modern cryptographic approaches such as attribute based encryption, searchable encryption, functional encryption to build a cloud-based e-health framework that protects users’ privacy, prevents both internal and external attacks, verifies the integrity of medical devices before application, and runs privacy-preserving data analytics on encrypted data. The project investigates modern encryption techniques and their combination in order to provide increased security of e-health applications that are then presented towards end-users utilizing a cloud-based platform. Although some topics such as security and privacy are already investigated through block-chain related technologies, it has been decided that the selected approaches would be more suitable for these particular challenges. In order to prototype its security services, ASCLEPIOS develops and deploys three large-scale healthcare demonstrators, provided by three leading hospitals from Europe. These demonstrators are rooted in the practice-based problems and applications provided by the project’s healthcare partners. The Amsterdam University Centers, University of Amsterdam, plans to improve stroke hyper-acute care through secure information sharing on a cloud computing platform to improve patient management. Additionally, they are also building prediction models to enable earlier discharge of patients from hospitals with lower risk factors. Charité Berlin plans to improve inpatient and outpatient sleep medication by remotely controlling the quality of the collected data and transferring it on-line for further analysis. Finally, the Norwegian Centre for e-health Research, University Hospital of North Norway is developing a system for privacy-preserving monitoring and benchmarking of antibiotics prescription of general practitioners. The common characteristics of these three scenarios are the increased demand for high levels of security in data transfer, storage and privacy preserving analytics on cloud infrastructures. In order deploy, operate and further develop these applications to increase their security with the ASCLEPIOS framework, a cloud computing testbed is being setup. The testbed uses state-of-the-art technologies for cloud application deployment and run-time orchestration in order to ensure the optimized deployment and execution of the demonstrator applications. As the data sources do not require the local execution (albeit in one case data may remain on the data source) of processing, there is no need for fog or edge computing, but the testbed is based on private OpenStack cloud computing infrastructures and utilizes the MiCADO framework which is compatible with different containers such as Docker and Kubernetes. The project started only recently, and currently it is in the early stages of systems design and specification. This presentation will provide a short introduction to the ASCLEPIOS project and its demonstrators and will present early results of the currently ongoing requirements specification and platform design processes.

This paper presents a novel approach to writing TOSCA templates for application reusability and portability in a modular auto-scaling and orchestration framework (MiCADO). The approach defines cloud resources as well as application containers in a flexible and generic way, and allows for those definitions to be extended with specific properties related to a desired container orchestrator chosen at deployment time. The approach is demonstrated in a proof-of-concept where only a minor change was required to a previously used application template in order to achieve the successful deployment and lifecycle management of the popular web authoring tool Wordpress on a new realization of the MiCADO framework featuring a different container orchestrator.

Public sector organizations and SMEs are increasingly considering using cloud services in their everyday activities. At the one hand on-demand access to cloud services in a flexible and elastic way could result in significant cost savings due to more efficient and convenient utilization. Further it can also replace large investment costs with long-term operational costs. On the other hand, the take up of cloud computing by the public sector and Small- and Medium-size Enterprises (SME) is still relatively low due to limited application-level flexibility and shortages in cloud specific skills. To meet these requirements a generic framework is needed to support public sector organizations and SMEs to run large variety of applications in the cloud in a cost effective, flexible and seamless way. To address these challenges the European funded COLA (Cloud Orchestration at the Level of Application) [1] project is designing and developing a modular architecture called MiCADO (Microservices-based Cloud Application-level Dynamic Orchestrator) [2]. It provides optimized deployment and run-time orchestration for cloud applications. MiCADO can manage applications considering their specific deployment, execution, scalability and security requirements. To further address this challenge COLA uses TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications [3] to describe applications to be executed in the cloud. Application developers can create so called Application Description Templates (ADT) to specify and submit their applications to the cloud through MiCADO. ADTs define two key properties of applications: topologies and policies. There are two approaches to define ADTs: using either command-line interfaces or graphical user interfaces. Command-line interface requires deep knowledge of the TOSCA specification and good YAML knowledge. Since application developers in the public sector organizations and at SMEs may not have this knowledge COLA’s priority is providing a GUI–based environment to enable application developers to describe their applications. The project investigated several GUI-based TOSCA development environments such as, OpenTOSCA Winery [4] and Alien 4 Cloud [5]. Winery generates XML-based specification of application topologies. The current Winery version automatically translates the XML-based TOSCA specifications into YAML to make them compatible with the latest TOSCA specification. Since each translation has its own limitations, some TOSCA features that are required in COLA, are lost in translation. The other limitation of Winery is that it does not support the definition of TOSCA policy specifications. Fig. 1 presents a simple topology template developed in Winery. Although Alien 4 Cloud supports the definition of cloud applications through a GUI environment, the generated description is not fully TOSCA compliant and cannot be parsed with most widely used TOSCA parsers. Considering the above listed limitations, COLA is developing a GUI-based environment to support application specification in TOSCA YAML v1.0. The extra feature of this environment will be a wide range support for policy specification, for example enabling development of deployment, execution, scalability and security policies.

To support scientists of different disciplines, different fields of Computer Science have developed tools and infrastructures with the aim of giving them access to vast computational resources in the easiest possible way. Such extremely complex structures have evolved naturally in the last decades both in depth and breath and, in addition to scientists, a plethora of heterogeneous actors (system administrators, developers, etc.) cooperate and interact with them. This complex and unstructured flow of actions and information poses difficulties in the development and usage of Science Gateways because information can be missing or hard to isolate at the right layer. In this paper, we aim to start a discussion on how to best manage these information flows to help the design and implementation of more flexible and userfriendly Science Gateways and workflow management systems in the future.