The Integrated Dissemination Program Application Onboarding Process

In the fall of 2014, the National Centers for Environmental Prediction Central Operations (NCO) began running NOAA applications on the Integrated Dissemination Program (IDP) server platform in College Park, MD. The applications came from development groups across NOAA who had done the development and were running the applications pseudo-operationally. The IDP servers provided a path to complete the final steps of making the applications fully operational.

To bring a wide variety of applications to the same platform, NCO developed a standard onboarding process. The process identified the common aspects of each application and allowed for specific differences. This structured approach allowed NCO to onboard seven unique application suites to the IDP servers over a two year period. The same approach was used for the initial installations and subsequent upgrades.

This presentation discusses the various applications - their commonalities and differences in onboarding, the identification of hardware and system requirements, the use of shared resources and their benefits or liabilities, the collection of data ingest and product distribution requirements, test plan creation and execution, and the onboarding activities that lead to an application gaining operational status.