Rapid Scaling of a Danish Public Health System Under COVID-19

Abstract

In recent years cloud infrastructure services have acted as engines for scaling applications when user demand spikes. A discipline typically recognized as complex, expensive, error-prone, and time-consuming. In the field of healthcare services, data is considered sensitive under the European Union’s data protection law and are therefore under strict jurisdiction disallowing the Danish public services to utilize cloud scalability. During the COVID-19 lockdown a small group of expert practitioners was tasked with scaling public health services to accommodate an exponential number of excess users who needed to access test results and immunity passports. An effort further restrained by a severely limited timeframe of two weeks. By utilizing the critical incident technique this paper is an effort empirically to capture the most significant decisions in the scaling process including organizational aspects, virtualization, content delivery network, lazy-loading, and firewall interface configuration.