A Cloud Environment for AWIPS Development, Testing, and Training

The National Weather Service (NWS) AWIPS Program Office (APO) is investigating the use of a cloud environment for code development, functional testing, scientific evaluation, training, and case studies. This variety of potential uses of an AWIPS cloud environment adds complexity to the investigation. For this discussion, development refers to the in-house development teams - both government and contractors - and the development partners external to the NWS. Testing and testbeds within the NWS that need to be considered include functional testbeds, where new features and bug fixes are tested prior to delivery to the field offices and scientific testbeds, where new data and techniques are presented to forecasters as enhancements to the forecast process. Training also needs to considered when investigating cloud usage, as the NWS Training Center maintains multiple AWIPS systems to conduct system administration and forecaster education. This includes the Weather Event Simulator (WES) that allows a user to analyze a case study for a scientific paper or to replay a significant weather event for training purposes.

These areas could all benefit from moving to a distributed cloud environment, and this paper will explore the steps the APO is undergoing to evaluate the use of the cloud environment for AWIPS.