Software Deployment in a Dynamic Cloud: From Device to Service Orientation in a Hospital Environment

Hospital environments are currently primarily device-oriented: software services are installed, often manually, on specific devices. For instance, an application to view MRI scans may only be available on a limited number of workstations. The medical world is changing to a service-oriented environment, which means that every software service should be available on every device. However, these devices have widely varying capabilities, ranging from powerful workstations to PDAs, and high-bandwidth local machines to low-bandwidth remote machines. To support running applications in such an environment, the authors need to treat the hospital machines as a cloud, where components of the application are automatically deployed to machines in the cloud with the required capabilities and connectivity.