 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 virtual. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2020, of course, happening virtual this year. We always love when we get to talk to the practitioners in this community, so much happening in the developer space. And really excited to have on the program first-time guest in a very timely topic. Have a good welcome, Farbad Abohasani, who is the back-end lead for How's My Flattening, which is a joint research project related to COVID-19 associated with the University of Toronto. Farbad, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. All right, so maybe explain, how's my flattening? The term flattening the curve is something that I think everyone around the globe is familiar with now. Canada, you've got some great initiatives going, so help us understand how you got involved in this and what is the project. For sure, so I'll take us back to March, which now feels like years ago. Back in March, we could look across in Europe and we saw that, I feel as we're being overwhelmed, this new COVID thing was happening and there seemed to be nothing happening here, despite the fact that we know what was going on in Europe. So this whole collaboration started, it's really the brainchild of Dr. Ben Sine, who's a radiologist at a Trillium Hall of Partners. And the idea was, why don't we put all the data that is related to COVID for the province of Ontario, where I'm from, in one place, right? So for the data-minded people, like a lot of people on this program here and for the data-minded people of Ontario to be able to have the information they need to make good decisions. Targeted both at the general public and at policymakers to really empower them with the right tools. We know the data is siloed in healthcare and we know, you know, when this whole thing started, everything was on a website, you would get a daily update, but it wasn't something that you could analyze, something you couldn't use really, it wasn't usable. That's how everything kind of started is, what if we did something about that? What if we brought all the data in one place? What if we visualized it and put all the resources in one place? And that was really this, how'smyflattening.ca, which is this initiative that I got involved with back in March. And what we've been doing is building a number of dashboards based on COVID data that are close to real-time as possible, doing a number of analyses to answer specific questions and doing deep dives into specific questions. We have a team of scientific experts for our leadership. You know, Dr. Ben Fine, I mentioned earlier, there's Dr. Laura Rosella, who's the epidemiologist out of the University of Toronto. And then we have Dr. Ali, that he's Austin Oye, who's a data science lead over at ClickHelp. So we got this kind of three perfect organization of the right talents required and we've been trying to tackle this COVID in whatever way we can by making the data transparent. Yeah, there've been a lot of initiatives obviously that have had to accelerate really fast during this time. It brings us inside a little bit. How long did it take to spin the site up? How do you make sure you're getting good data in? Who decides which visualizations? Love to hear a little bit about how that has matured over the months that you've had the project out there. For sure, so when we started, what people were doing out on Twitter really where a lot of this activity was happening, what people were grabbing spreadsheets and typing out every day, what was happening? And I mean, coming from, I'm not by any means a technical developer, that's not what I specialize in, but having some development background, it made sense that things could be done so much better. So we started to build data pipelines starting in March. We had a couple of government sources that were public. It was basically scrapping the government website and recording that in a database. And then we started to visualize it. We're using whatever we could. So we started with Tableau just because we had a few, we were trying to build a community, right? So a community of people who wanna help and do this. So we had some Tableau experts on our team and our community, and that's the way we went. So we had the database. We started to connect it to Tableau and start to visualize and start to do deep dives into analysis of it. And then the project has matured from that web scrapper ever since with a more complex data pipeline, building in data from different sources and visualizing them in different ways and expanding our dashboarding and expanding our analysis. Well, the KubeCon show that we're here at is so much about community, obviously open source is a major driver of what's going on there. So it sounded like that was a big piece of what you're working on. Help us bring inside out of that community build. We'd love to hear if there's any projects and tools you mentioned Tableau for visualization but anything from open source also that you're using. 100%. So actually I've never been involved in open source project before this. This was kind of my first attempt, if you will. We started on GitHub quite early on actually one of the partners that got involved and reached out to us was Red Hat. Of course, they're known for doing open source and for excelling at it. And we had some amazing help from them into how we can organize a community. And we started to move the community over from GitHub to GitLab. We started to, we collaborate in Slack a lot of time and there was a lot of silos. So we started to break those down and move them into GitLab and all conversations were happening in public. It would be more closer to an open source approach. And honestly, a lot of the people that are involved are students, grad students who want to help are people in the community that want to help, people from all kinds of different backgrounds. I think we're really bringing in, open source is not a known concept in a lot of these clinical scientific communities. It's a lot more developer oriented and I think it's been a learning opportunity for everyone involved. Some things that may seem kind of default or basic have been a big learning opportunity for everyone of issue tracking and labeling and using comments and not going back into our own old ways of like emailing people or messaging people in Slack. But yeah, there's been a lot of tools involved, GitLab was a big one. We went from having this kind of monolith to containerizing it and using Kubernetes. Of course we're developed with the help of Red Hat, we're able to move everything over to their OpenShift dedicated platform. And what that allowed us to do is really do a lot of, do things a lot better and do things in a bit of a more mature way. That's, sorry, that's quite a bit of information but that's kind of high level, what it's going to do. Well, no, it's great. One of the things we've been poking out for the last few years is in the early days you talk about Kubernetes, it was, oh, I need things at a scale. And while I'm sure that the amount of data and scale is important, speed was a major piece of what you needed to be involved in and you needed to be able to rally and change. So can you talk a little bit more, just OpenShift, what did that bring to the environment, any aspects related to the data that Red Hat helped you with? For sure, so a few things there. The one thing that OpenShift I think really helped us with was really, and I mean, Red Hat helped us with generally was establishing a proper CICD pipeline, right? So now we use GitLab itself, we have GitLab runners that basically all developers involved have their own branches, when they push code it gets auto-deployed to their branch and it just made everything a lot easier and a lot faster to be able to push things quickly without worrying about everything breaking. So that was definitely a big plus. The other thing that we're doing with, that is using containers actually, we've been working on this OpenData Hub which is working on another great open source project which is, again, built on Kubernetes and trying to break down some of the barriers when it comes to sharing data in the healthcare system. We're using that and with the help of Red Hat we're able to deploy that to be able to collaborate between hospitals, share data securely, do secured analytics and try to break down some of these silos that have gone up due to fears over security and privacy. So that's another great example of open source helping us kind of push things forward. Well, that's, I'm glad you brought that up, the OpenData Hub, that collaboration with other places when you're have data, being able to share that has to be important to talk, this was a collaboration to start with, what's the value of being able to work with other groups and to share your data beyond just the community that's working on it. For sure, so if you think about what's happening right now in a lot of hospitals in Canada and I mean, it's the same in the US is everyone is in this reopening stage. We shut down the economy, we shut down a lot of elective surgeries and a lot of procedures and no hospitals are trying to reopen, right? So I'm trying to figure out how to go back to their old capacity. And in that sense, they're all trying to solve for the same problem in different ways. So everyone is in their silo trying to tackle the same problems in a way. So what we're trying to do is basically get everyone together and collaborate on this open source environment, right? And what this OpenData Hub allows us to do is to some degree alleviate some of the fears over sharing data. So that we're not all doing the same thing in parallel or not talking to each other. We're able to share code, share data, get each other's opinions and use resources in the healthcare system more efficiently. So we're all trying to reach the same goal here. So imagine you've had a lot of learnings from this project that you've done. Have you given any thought to, once you get past the kind of immediate hurdle of COVID-19, will this technology be able to help you going forward? What do you see kind of post pandemic, if you will? I think the last piece that I touched on there is a big thing that I'm really hoping we'll be able to push forward past the pandemic. I think what the pandemic has shown us is the need for more transparency, more collaboration and being able to be more agile in response to things faster. And that's not how healthcare operates. And I think we know that now and we can see that. And I'm hoping this can be used as an opportunity to be able to bring people together to collaborate on projects like, how's my flattening? Outside of this, right? For not only the next pandemic, hopefully that never comes, but for other bigger problems that we face every day, collaboration can only help things, not hinder things. So I'm hoping that's one big side effect that comes out of this. And I think the data transparency thing is another big one that I'm hoping can improve outside of the COVID situation. Yeah, I wonder if I can ask you just a personal question. We've heard certain organizations say that, years of planning have been executed in months. When I think about all the technologies that you had thrown at you, all the new things you learned, often that's something that would have taken years, but you did it in months. So how do you work through that? There's only 24 hours in any day and we do need some sleep. So what was important from your standpoint, what partners and tools helped you and the team take advantage of all of these new technologies? Yeah, honestly, I think that the team is really, really important. We've had an amazing set of people that are quite diverse and then usually would quite honestly, never be seen in the same group together just because of all the different backgrounds that are there. So that was a big driver. I think everyone was motivated to get things done. What happened is when we first launched the site, we put together a basic feedback mechanism where we could hear from the public and we got an outpouring of support of people saying that they found this information really useful and I think that pushed everyone to work harder and kind of reinforce our belief that this is what we're doing is helpful and is making a difference in someone's life. And I think that helped everyone work harder. In terms of some of the tools that we used, yeah, I totally agree. I think there was a million things that we all learned and it definitely was an amazing growing opportunity, I think, for the whole group. I don't know if there's any wisdom I can impart there more than, I think we were just being pushed by the need and being driven by the support that we're getting. Yeah, well, you know, when there's a necessity to get things done, it's great to see the team execute. Last question I have for you. You've got all this data, you've got visualizations, you've been going through a lot of things. Any just interesting learnings that you had or something that were you able to visualize things in a certain way and the community reacted? Anything that you learned along the way that maybe surprised you? That's a really interesting question there. I think the biggest learning opportunity or surprise for me was how much people are willing to help if you just ask, right? A lot of people are involved. I mean, this is a huge group of volunteers who are just dedicating their time to this because they believe in it and because they think they're doing the right thing and they're doing it for a bigger cause. And it sounds very cheesy, but I think that was wonderful to me to see that we can bring together such diverse group of people to dedicate their time for free to do something for the public. Yeah, well, and along the note, I see on the website there is a get involved button, so is there anything, you know, skill set or people that you're looking for further to help the team? 100%, so I think when I, every time we do a presentation as any sort, we always ask for anyone who's watching to just go on our site and get involved. There's a million different things that you can get involved with. If you're a developer, we can always use help. If you're a database person, we can always use help if you're a designer. Honestly, we're a community-driven organization and we can always use more people in that community. That's the unique thing about the organization. So 100%, please do, to housemyflatname.ca and please do get involved in our GetLabs. Well, Farbaad, thank you so much for sharing. We definitely encourage the community, get involved. It's projects like this that are so critically important, especially right now during the pandemic. Thanks so much for joining and thank you for all the work you and the team did. Thank you for having me. All right, and stay tuned. There's much more coverage from KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2020 in Europe. Virtual edition, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching The Kube.