Breaking it Down, Using Modular Services to Improve the NOAA Earth Information System (NEIS)

The NOAA Earth Information System (NEIS) developed by NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) is a framework providing real-time high performance data discovery, access, and visualization. Along with a ESRL's unique visualization client, TerraViz, this framework provides seamless visualization and integration of data across time and space regardless of data size, physical location, or data format.

An enabling technology is the services behind the scenes. The NEIS team has continued research into improving the asynchronous, event driven architecture which supports and drives the performance of the framework. Services are continually evaluated and broken down into smaller, more modular, self contained components. The benefits have been numerous. Through this effort the NEIS team has improved many aspects of the overall framework including performance, fault tolerance, testing coverage, scalability, reliability, and agility.

This modular service approach provides the capability to monitor and pinpoint bottlenecks within the framework. Depending on the impact, the service can either be improved or scaled up to meet the requirements. Additionally, the modular nature reduces coupling between various components of the framework allowing individual services to be upgraded without taking down the entire system, decreasing the overall time to respond and fix to problems.

This talk will focus on our approach to developing these services to support the NEIS framework and TerraViz, along with discussion on findings, challenges, and future research.