Fine tuning the cloud for hard-to-reach areas: It can be a matter of life and death!

By Dean Powell, a software architect at Proximie.

Building and refining a technology like Proximie means you have to adapt for different environments, and we’ve been working tirelessly on how we can utilise the cloud for better connectivity, because when it comes to surgery, it can be a matter of life and death. The quality and the milliseconds do really matter, and it’s my job to make sure this is always seamless, whether you are in Boston, London, Delhi, Nairobi or Antarctica!

One of the key concepts is distributed computing, rather than centralising our infrastructure in one particular region. Through some smart strategic use of the cloud we have looked to distribute our architecture.

“The theory being that the closer the cloud is to the end user, the more seamless their experience of Proximie.”

Distributing your infrastructure and technology across the world means you’re not dependent on one particular area. So we have looked to personalise your cloud experience, with what we call ‘media pops’.

Our ‘media pop’ is a point of presence. So in the traditional sense points of presence is quite an old school telco provider term. They would say they got a point of presence in X location, and you’d kind of use it like a peer-to-peer system, and create your networks based on that. We’re providing in real-time, voice and video which is very time sensitive. And it is critical to keep the underlying infrastructure as close to the end user as possible.

Our ‘media pop’ is a hyper local approach working with the cloud. When you’re browsing a website for example, you’re less sensitive to the latency involved in the content you’re consuming, but when you’re working with a real time application when you’re consuming a live video feed, the milliseconds matter and shouldering the burden through dedicated ‘media pops’ that are closer to the end user, we’re reducing that latency.

“We’re trying to keep them as simple and agnostic to the cloud providers as possible.”

In the future, the technology could possibly run on edge devices, or infrastructure that is local to the hospital — but that’s an infrastructure issue to tackle in the future.

Working with the Cloud set up already in different localities, means we can safeguard connectivity for our users and personalise their cloud experience. It’s something we are really excited about as we are convinced it can make a big difference to surgeons., and hopefully improve the experience, which ultimately, could save a life.