A Data Processing System Designed for the Cloud

The Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) Common Ground System (CGS) Interface Data Processing Segment (IDPS) is the key component in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Polar Satellite data processing for the National Weather Service. IDPS’s mission is to create extremely high-quality weather products with very low latency and very high reliability. IDPS was designed in the early 2000’s long before “The Cloud” was anything more than a dream. The system design has matured over the past 15 years but the initial concepts of modularity and flexibility have proven to be a nearly perfect fit for operation in “The Cloud”. During early 2018 the NASA and Raytheon IDPS team was able to forklift our current system into an Amazon Web Services environment in less than 2 weeks. This forklift included the majority of the components necessary to be operational. A high level of capability was demonstrated during the quick-turnaround proof of concept study: rapid deployment of infrastructure, live satellite data feed, multi-mission data production, data delivery to mission partner, maintenance release update and string transition.

As an example of a benefit to NOAA , a typical physical hardware refresh takes three to four months to procure and configure the hardware to be ready for an installation of IDPS. The Cloud allows this to occur within a few weeks, and in the future, within a few days. The Cloud also enables the capability to implement hardware architecture upgrades within a normal maintenance cycle. Once installed it is simple to modify the configuration of the environment to best fit the data processing needs of current and future missions. The Cloud enables the architectural flexibility of IDPS to be rapidly applied to new products, new instruments and new missions.

This paper describes how the inherent modularity and flexibility of the IDPS design allows for a simple migration into a cloud environment with only targeted optimization required to successfully meet Operational Readiness Requirements.