AWS — Case Study of NASA

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. The term is generally used to describe data centers available to many users over the Internet .

Who is using cloud computing?

Social Media is the most popular and often overlooked application of cloud computing. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and many other social networking sites use cloud computing. Social networking sites are designed to find people you already know or would like to know. Almost everyone uses cloud computing to some degree in this day and age. Even if all you use is Gmail you are using Cloud Computing. If you mean for serious business type work then data scientists and IT professionals.

Five reasons to use the cloud

• Data protection.
• Regulatory compliance and data residency requirements.
• Scalability and flexibility.
• Cost efficiencies.

What is AWS?

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.

NASA ( National Aeronautics and Space Administration)

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is an independent agency of the U.S. Federal Government responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeeding the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. NASA is supporting the International Space Station and is overseeing the development of the orion spacecraft, the Space launch system, and commercial crew vehicles.

Why Amazon Web Services

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, the WESTPrime contract service provider. As an Advanced Consulting Partner of the AWS Partner Network (APN), InfoZen chose to build the solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS). “Amazon was the largest cloud services provider, had a strong government cloud presence, and offered the most suitable cloud in terms of elasticity,” recalls Sandeep Shilawat, Cloud Program Manager at InfoZen.

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, InfoZen took advantage of the following Amazon Web Services:

• Amazon EC2 : 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.
• Amazon S3 : Amazon Simple Storage Service(Amazon S3) which supports object storage for incoming media, metadata, and published assets.
• ELB : 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 SQC : Amazon Simple Queue Service(Amazon SQC) which is used to decouple incoming jobs from pipeline processes.
• Amazon RDS : Amazon Relational Database Service(Amazon RDS) which is used for automatic synchronization and failover.
• Amazon DynamoDB : Amazon DynamoDB a fast and flexible NoSQL database service, which is used to track incoming jobs, published assets, and users.
• Amazon Elastic Transcoder : Amazon Elastic Transcoder which is used to transcode audio and video to various resolutions.
• Amazon cloudSearch : Amazon cloudSearch which is used to support searching by free text or fields.
• Amazon SNS : Amazon Simple Notification Service(Amazon SNS) which is used to trigger the processing pipeline when new content is uploaded.
• Amazon CloudWatch : Amazon CloudWatch which provides a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications running on AWS.

How NASA benefited by AWS?

Through its use of AWS, with support from InfoZen, NASA is making its vast wealth of pictures, videos, and audio files — previously in some 60 “collections” across NASA’s 10 centers — easily discoverable in one centralized location, delivering these benefits:

• Easy Access to the Wonders of Space. The Image and Video Library automatically optimizes the user experience for each user’s particular device. It is also fully compliant with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which requires federal agencies to make their technology solutions accessible to people with disabilities. Captions can be turned on or off for videos played on the site, and text-based caption files can be downloaded for any video.
• Built-in Scalability. All components of the NASA Image and Video Library are built to scale on demand, as needed to handle usage spikes. “On-demand scalability will be invaluable for events such as the solar eclipse that’s happening later this summer — both as we upload new media and as the public comes to view that content,” says Bryan Walls, Imagery Experts Deputy Program Manager at NASA.
• Good Use of Taxpayer Dollars. By building its Image and Video Library in the cloud, NASA avoided the costs associated with deploying and maintaining server and storage hardware in-house. Instead, the agency can simply pay for the AWS resources it uses at any given time.

Thank you for reading…!!!