How NASA Is using AWS, case study
Earth and Space on AWS
Have you ever looked up at night and wondered about the mysteries of space? Or marveled at the expansiveness of our galaxy? You can easily explore all this and more at the NASA Image and Video Library, which provides easy access to more than 140,000 still images, audio recordings, and videos — documenting NASA’s more than half a century of achievements in exploring the vast unknown. For NASA, providing the public with such easy access to the wonders of space has been a journey all its own.
But what is AWS? How is NASA using this?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully-featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers — including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies — are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.
The Best thing about AWS is a pay-as-you-go approach for pricing for over 160 cloud services. With AWS you pay only for the individual services you need, for as long as you use them, and without requiring long-term contracts or complex licensing. AWS pricing is similar to how you pay for utilities like water and electricity. You only pay for the services you consume, and once you stop using them, there are no additional costs or termination fees.
There are 4 main types of cloud computing: private clouds, public clouds, hybrid clouds, and multiclouds.
- Public cloud:
The public cloud is defined as computing services offered by third-party providers over the public Internet, making them available to anyone who wants to use or purchase them. They may be free or sold on-demand, allowing customers to pay only per usage for the CPU cycles, storage, or bandwidth they consume.public clouds can save companies from the expensive costs of having to purchase, manage and maintain on-premises hardware and application infrastructure -
- Private cloud:
The private cloud is defined as computing services offered either over the Internet or a private internal network and only to select users instead of the general public. Private clouds are loosely defined as cloud environments solely dedicated to a single end-user or group, where the environment usually runs behind that user or group’s firewall. All clouds become private clouds when the underlying IT infrastructure is dedicated to a single customer with completely isolated access.
NASA Case Study
NASA began providing online access to photos, video, and audio in the early 2000s when media capture began to shift from analog and film to digital. Before long, each of NASA’s 10 field centers was making its imagery available online, including digitized versions of some older assets.
The Challenge
“With media in so many different places, you needed institutional knowledge of NASA to know where to look,” says Rodney Grubbs, Imagery Experts Program Manager at NASA. “If you wanted a video of the space shuttle launch, you had to go to the Kennedy Space Center website. If you wanted pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, you went to the Goddard Space Flight Center website. With 10 different centers and dozens of distributed image collections, it took a lot of digging around to find what you wanted.”
Early efforts to provide a one-stop-shop consisted of essentially “scraping” content from the different sites, bringing it together in one place, and layering a search engine on top. “In large part, those initial efforts were unsuccessful because each center categorized its imagery in different ways,” says Grubbs. “As a result, we often had five to six copies of the same image, each described in different ways, which made searches difficult and delivered a poor user experience.”The development of the new NASA Image and Video Library was handled by the Web Services Office within NASA’s Enterprise Service and Integration Division. Technology selection, solution design, and implementation was managed by InfoZen (acquired by and now operating as ManTech International), the WESTPrime contract service provider.
ManTech International chose to build the solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
NASA formally launched its Image and Video Library in March 2017. Key features include:
- Website:
https://images.nasa.gov/details-jsc2020m000039_Space%20to%20Ground_338_200918
• A user interface that automatically scales for PCs, tablets, and mobile phones across virtually every browser and operating system.
• A search interface that lets people easily find what they’re looking for, including the ability to choose from gallery view or list view and to narrow-down search results by media type and/or by year.
• The ability to easily download any media found on the site — or share it on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, or Google+.
• Access to the metadata associated with each asset, such as file size, file format, which center created the asset, and when it was created. When available, users can also view EXIF/camera data for still images such as exposure, shutter speed, and lens used.
• An application programming interface (API) for automated uploads of new content — including integration with NASA’s existing authentication mechanism.
Architecture
The NASA Image and Video Library is a cloud-native solution, with the front-end web app separated from the backend API. It runs as immutable infrastructure in a fully automated environment, with all infrastructure defined in code to support continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD).
In building the solution, ManTech International took advantage of the following AWS services:
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. This enables NASA to scale up under load and scale down during periods of inactivity to save money and pay for only what it uses.
• Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), which is used to distribute incoming traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances, as required to achieve redundancy and fault-tolerance.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which supports object storage for incoming (uploaded) media, metadata, and published assets.
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), which is used to decouple incoming jobs from pipeline processes.
• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which is used for automatic synchronization and failover.
• Amazon DynamoDB, a fast and flexible NoSQL database service, which is used to track incoming jobs, published assets, and users.
• Amazon Elastic Transcoder, which is used to transcode audio and video to various resolutions.
• Amazon CloudSearch, which is used to support searching by free text or fields.
• Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), which is used to trigger the processing pipeline when new content is uploaded.
• AWS CloudFormation, which enables automated creation, updating, and destruction of AWS resources. ManTech International also used the Troposphere library, which enables the creation of objects via AWS CloudFormation using Python instead of hand-coded JSON — each object representing one AWS resource such as an instance, an Elastic IP (EIP) address, or a security group.
• Amazon CloudWatch, which provides a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications running on AWS.
