This hyper-growth Medtech company is revolutionizing pregnancy care, but this means carefully addressing how engineers access and use streaming data to comply with regulations.
through careful data access controls
per min per patient of biometric data processed by Kafka
across the organization
Nuvo’s data products roll out at an impressive rate for a heavily regulated organization - from wearable bands collecting biosensory data and web services for health practitioners, to AI-powered insights on foetal heart rate.
Several years ago Nuvo totally rebuilt and modernized their data infrastructure to suit streaming data and applications. High availability, resiliency and real-time processing were all must-haves to reliably capture and transform 18,000 packets of electro and phonocardiogram per minute as well as other biometric data.
As they assessed the best technology stack, RabbitMQ did not give Nuvo the flexibility they needed. Apache Kafka and Kafka Connect with Kubernetes - plus MQTT for the Internet of Things - covers their requirements allowing engineering teams to write in whatever framework they like from python to C-Code and Java.
Amit Hasson, VP Software Engineering at Nuvo, describes the data protection and regulatory minefield they are working with:
“Our biggest concerns are around data leakage and compliance for regulations such as HIPAA. Any kind of data breach or security incident can bring the whole business down. Certain teams are unable to have access to personal data for compliance reasons - so this is key in our due diligence process for any technologies we work with.”
Amit Hasson, VP Software Engineering - Nuvo
The regulatory requirements do not end with HIPAA. FDA approval has taken years of careful box-checking and process-building. This means having clear best practices around who accesses what; a primary port of call for Nuvo’s Security Officer.
And then, there is the fact that Nuvo cannot have “Software of unknown pedigree” in their systems without sufficient technical and legal due diligence. As a result, Nuvo’s engineering teams have an open-source, build-first philosophy when it comes to their data projects.
If there is a strong commercial product or service, they will make a case for it, and there are only two: Auth0 and Lenses.
Nuvo selected Lenses to provide a developer experience over Apache Kafka.
This meant that the back-end team could easily troubleshoot and debug data using a secure interface, without needing to turn to the command line.
“Having Lenses as a developer experience and UI for Kafka made sense for us. We use it locally or at a specific point in time to identify issues that could impact our services - a serious matter of attention for us in making our platform and applications healthy and fault tolerant.”
Amit Hasson, VP Software Engineering - Nuvo
Troubleshooting & debugging: Lenses offers an easy-to-use interface over Kafka
Kafka-agnostic with no lock-in: Acts as a layer over your existing Kafka - managed, on-prem or self-managed
Compliant by design: Data policies that allow granular, flexible access controls for Kafka and its related data technologies.