Cloud-Based Disaster Management as a Service: A Microservice Approach for Hurricane Twitter Data Analysis

Abstract

Disasters whether natural or man-made have great impact on countries and civilians. Proper information across the main disaster phases need to be delivered on time and to the right people to minimize the impact and provide needed resources. Social media and Twitter in particular, is an important mean of information sharing in real-time as part of a complete cyber-physical emergency management system during a disaster. Twitter can be used in any place in the world through smartphones or other mediums with an internet access connection. The vast and varied number of tweets produced during a disaster will benefit from the cloud scalable storage and processing resources. As a centralized processing system is more vulnerable when a disaster strikes, there is a need for a more resilient distributed system architecture that allows for the distribution of both processing and storage resources. The goal of our study is to develop and evaluate a prototype of a microservice architecture for twitter data analytics during a disaster that meets the requirements of disaster management. In this paper, we design a cloud-based microservices twitter analytics framework for disaster management and implement a basic prototype system. Our prototype system demonstrates that the microservices approach allows for a distributed, dynamic, reliable and scalable system architecture on cloud platform that goes in hand with disaster domain requirements.