MACPAC is a federal legislative branch agency tasked with reviewing state and federal Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) access and payment policies and making recommendations to Congress. By March 15 and again by June 15 each year, the agency produces a comprehensive report for Congress that compiles results from Medicaid and CHIP data sources for the 50 states and territories. The CIO of MACPAC wanted a secure, cost-effective, high performance platform that met their needs to crunch this large amount of health data. In this session, learn how MACPAC and 8KMiles helped set up the agency’s Big Data/HPC analytics platform on AWS using SAS analytics software.

1. Empowering Congress with Data-Driven
Analytics
Mathew Chase,
November 13, 2013
Sri Vasireddy,
© 2013 Amazon.com, Inc. and its affiliates. All rights reserved. May not be copied, modified, or distributed in whole or in part without the express consent of Amazon.com, Inc.

2. • A small federal legislative branch agency
• Newly established in late 2010
• Going beyond the “Cloud First” goal
to “Cloud Only”

3. Hello
• Mathew Chase
• Federal CIO
• Over 20 years experience in the
public and private sectors leading
technology operations

4. Who are you?
•
•
•
•
Government
Health care industry
Cloud newbies
AWS ninjas
• Whoops… wrong session

5. Question?
How many of you are using
AWS as your primary
computing datacenter?

6. MACPAC’s AWS Datacenter
• AWS to replace an onsite or hosted
datacenter
• Single primary region with cold recovery on
the the other coast
• Multiple AZs for redundancy
• Separate VPCs for security “air gaps”

7. MACPAC: the “perfect” cloud customer
•
•
•
•
Predicable work cycles
Two intense work periods (annual)
Growing with an undefined future
Potential need for more computing
resources
• Very cost conscious
• No legacy infrastructure

8. What we achieved in the cloud
• > 40% reduction in capital expenses
– With additional savings in rent, utilities, and labor
•
•
•
•
Cost spread over typical equipment lifespan
On demand storage and archiving
Zero over provisioning
Ability to expand and contract resources at will

9. Core focus
Recommendations to Congress on
Medicaid and the Children’s Health
Insurance Program

10. Reports to the Congress
Reports due by:
• March 15th &
• June 15th
www.MACPAC.gov/reports

11. Research backed by analytics
• Analyze Medicaid program data
• Find intersections with Medicare
• Evaluate Medicaid survey information

12. Tools
• SAS Office Analytics enterprise platform
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux x64
• Amazon EC2

13. Concerns
1. Security
2. Performance

14. Security

15. Security Requirements
• Multi-user controlled environment
• Isolated environment with strong controls
• No sensitive and personal data sitting at
periphery
• Data encrypted at rest and in transit

16. Access Protection Challenge
• Twenty Instances
• Twenty Ports for AD
• 20 x 20 = 400 Rules

17. Access Control Using Security Groups
AD-1
AD-2
Accept AD related requests from ‘Infra’ group
AD Security Group
Client Instances
Accept DNS queries from AD group
Infra Security Group
DNS-1
DNS-2
DNS SecurityGroup
Accept DNS queries from ‘Infra’ group

18. Encrypted
Data flow

19. Cloud
Security
Design

20. Performance

21. SAS Requirements
• Very IO intensive
• Sequential read and writes
o 35-70mb/sec per core of IO desired
o GOAL: 4 core system = ~200mb /sec IO

22. Base AWS Structure
• M3 extra large running RHEL x64 for cluster
o 1 TB EBS RAID 10 for primary data (4, 500gb drives)
o 1 TB EBS RAID 0 for temp work space (4, 256gb drives)
o 1 TB EBS LUKS encrypted RAID 0 for ETL (4, 256gb drives)

23. Can AWS yield the necessary performance?

24. In the immortal words of
Spinal Tap:
“These go to eleven!”

25. Turning up the AWS dial

26. Volume @ 3
Specifications
M3 extra large
4 – 256gb EBS Disks
RAID 0 Stripe

27. fio Sequential Read @ 3
[ec2-user]# fio sastest.fio
job1: (g=0): rw=read, bs=4K-4K/4K-4K/4K-4K, ioengine=sync, iodepth=1
fio-2.1.2
Starting 1 process
Jobs: 1 (f=1)
job1: (groupid=0, jobs=1): err= 0: pid=31661: Sun Oct 27 23:07:18 2013
read : io=102400KB, bw=77167KB/s, iops=19291, runt= 1327msec
clat (usec): min=3, max=25911, avg=44.70, stdev=572.02
lat (usec): min=5, max=25913, avg=46.86, stdev=572.02
77,166 KB/s
Run status group 0 (all jobs):
READ: io=102400KB, aggrb=77166KB/s, minb=77166KB/s, maxb=77166KB/s,
mint=1327msec, maxt=1327msec

28. Volume @ 10
Specifications
M3 extra large
4 – 256gb EBS Disks
4000 iops per drive
RAID 0 Stripe

29. fio Sequential Read @ 10
[ec2-user]$ fio sastest.fio
job1: (g=0): rw=read, bs=4K-4K/4K-4K/4K-4K, ioengine=sync, iodepth=1
fio-2.1.2
Starting 1 process
191,401 KB/s
job1: (groupid=0, jobs=1): err= 0: pid=2731: Tue Nov 5 22:55:33 2013
read : io=102400KB, bw=191402KB/s, iops=47850, runt=
535msec
clat (usec): min=3, max=51820, avg=13.29, stdev=337.22
lat (usec): min=4, max=51821, avg=15.52, stdev=337.21
Run status group 0 (all jobs):
READ: io=102400KB, aggrb=191401KB/s, minb=191401KB/s, maxb=191401KB/s,
mint=535msec, maxt=535msec

30. “If we need that extra push over the cliff.
You know what we do?”
“11! Exactly.”
— Nigel

31. fio Sequential Read @ 11
[ec2-user]$ fio sastest.fio
job1: (g=0): rw=read, bs=4K-4K/4K-4K/4K-4K, ioengine=sync, iodepth=1
fio-2.1.2
Starting 1 process
432,067 KB/s
job1: (groupid=0, jobs=1): err= 0: pid=3133: Tue Nov 5 23:13:13 2013
read : io=102400KB, bw=432068KB/s, iops=108016, runt=
237msec
clat (usec): min=0, max=1594, avg= 8.26, stdev=42.59
lat (usec): min=0, max=1594, avg= 8.38, stdev=42.59
Run status group 0 (all jobs):
READ: io=102400KB, aggrb=432067KB/s, minb=432067KB/s, maxb=432067KB/s,
mint=237msec, maxt=237msec

32. Volume @ 11
Specifications
4 – 256gb EBS Disks
4000 iops per drive
RAID 0 Stripe
cg1.4xlarge (10gb io channel)

33. fio Sequential Read @ 11
[ec2-user]$ fio sastest.fio
job1: (g=0): rw=read, bs=4K-4K/4K-4K/4K-4K, ioengine=sync, iodepth=1
fio-2.1.2
Starting 1 process
432,067 KB/s
job1: (groupid=0, jobs=1): err= 0: pid=3133: Tue Nov 5 23:13:13 2013
read : io=102400KB, bw=432068KB/s, iops=108016, runt=
237msec
clat (usec): min=0, max=1594, avg= 8.26, stdev=42.59
lat (usec): min=0, max=1594, avg= 8.38, stdev=42.59
Run status group 0 (all jobs):
READ: io=102400KB, aggrb=432067KB/s, minb=432067KB/s, maxb=432067KB/s,
mint=237msec, maxt=237msec

34. I am pretty sure I can make the dial go higher
Ram Disks
Block sizes
Larger stripes
Application tuning
Etc…

35. WARNING!
• Be sure to touch all sectors of a new disk per
AWS guidance prior to testing and production
Command for Unix environments
$ dd if=/dev/md0 of=/dev/null

36. You are not alone…
•
•
•
•
Guidance from software vendors
AWS professional services
Use an iterative process (Fail quickly)
Third party partners (8kMiles)
so get going!

37. What did we learn?
•
•
•
•
Make a decision
Start at zero…
Spend time really thinking about security
And then crank it up where you need it
“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (1983)

38. References
• Amazon EBS Volume Performance
– http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/EBSPerfor
mance.html
• AWS Microsoft Platform Security
– http://media.amazonwebservices.com/AWS_Microsoft_Platform_Se
curity.pdf
• Benchmarking SAS I/O: Verifying I/O
Performance Using fio
– http://support.sas.com/resources/papers/proceedings13/4792013.pdf
• This is Spinal Tap (Movie, 1984, Rob Reiner - Director)

39. Special Thanks to: 8kMiles, AWS, and SAS
And thank you for your time today.

40. Contact Information
mathew.chase@macpac.gov
www.macpac.gov

41. Please give us your feedback on this
presentation
BDT304
As a thank you, we will select prize
winners daily for completed surveys!