Deploying EDEX in the Azure Cloud

One of the biggests challenges facing AWIPS is how well the system can handle the ever-increasing size of data products going forward.  Though EDEX is deployed in a clustered configuration inside NWS offices, maintaining multiple servers and managing the networking involved is not a practical solution for UCAR member institutions.  For this, a cloud-based approach is explored.  Distributed deployment of the AWIPS EDEX data server in the Microsoft Azure Cloud was previously not possible due to the inability to network filesystems across Red Hat 6 instances.  Recent efforts have been made by UCAR's Unidata Program Center to support a Red Hat 7 AWIPS release to be deployed in the cloud in a distributed configuration, taking advantage of Azure's file sharing capabilities.  The goals of this work are to isolate the database from the ingest and decoding processes (adding a layer of data preservation to withstand system updates and reinstallations), and to significantly increase real-time data ingest by distirbuting decoder resource load across instances, scaled for optimal data throughput.