AWS AND THE NASA CASE STUDY!

IF YOU WANTS TO KNOW WHY THE AMAZON WEB SERVICES (AWS) IS SO FAMOUS PUBLIC CLOUD, AND WHY THE ALL TOP MNC's IS THE CUSTOMER OF AWS, THEN YES, YOU ARE IN THE RIGHT PLACE.

HAVE YOU EVER THINK,

• HOW DOES AWS BECOMES SO FAMOUS PUBLIC CLOUD??,
• WHY ALL THE TOP MNC's RUN THERE SERVER IN TOP OF THE AWS??,

So, let's take an simple example to get out from all of these Questions. Suppose, we as a Engineer decided to do a Start-Up in some field like we have to create an Facebook like App for the Public, which have some more extra features in it. But as we know for doing these we need huge-server because we have to store huge amount of Data per day basis, Deploying our own personal server will become too-costly for us and also by chance if our Start-up will goes down in Future or will not get proper feedback from users, then it will become huge lose for our company. Then the problem is-

• HOW TO SOLVE THESE BIG-DATA PROBLEM??
• WHERE DO WE DEPLOY THE SERVER OF OUR START-UP??

Here comes the role of Public Cloud, where we easily deploy our Server and also we only have to Pay that much amount to them, that much we use there services, in Cloud Computing world these concept is known as PAY-AS-YOU-GO.

PAY-AS-YOU-GO :-

• Payment method for Cloud Computing that charges based on usage. The practice is similar to that of utility bills, using only resources that are needed.
• There are no wasted Resources, we only have to pay for services procured, rather than provisioning for a certain amount of resources that may or may not be used.

So, the Public Cloud Computing is the best solution for all of the above problems that we had for our Start-up. But now the question arises-

• Which Public Cloud is best??
• Why we will choose AWS Cloud??

So, lets start the Journey with AWS-

WHAT IS AMAZON WEB SERVICES (AWS) :-

• Cloud Platform offered by Amazon.com Inc (AMZN), has become a giant component of the e-commerce giant's business portfolio.
• It is the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally.
• The Highly profitable division provides servers, storage, networking, remote computing, email, mobile development, and security.
• In the First Quarter of 2020, AWS brought in a record $10 Billion of revenue, accounting for 13.5 % of Amazon's total revenue. Having grown steadily in the 30-percent range the past few quarters, AWS is a frontrunner to other Cloud Computing platforms such as competitor Azure.
• Millions of customer including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies- are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovative faster.

WHY AMAZON WEB SERVICE (AWS) :-

As of February 2020, one independent analyst reports AWS has over a third of the market at 32.4%, with Azure following behind at half that amount 17.6%, and Google Cloud at 6%. Why?-

1. FLEXIBLE - It enables you to select the operating system, programming language, web application platforms, database, and other services you need. Gives you a virtual environment that lets you load the software and services your application requires.
2. RELIABLE- Gives us the advantage of a scalable, reliable and secure global computing infrastructure, the virtual backbone of Amazon.com’s multi-billion dollar online business that has been honed for over a decade.
3. EASY TO USE- AWS is designed to allow application providers, ISVs, and vendors to quickly and securely host your applications – whether an existing application or a new SaaS-based application. You can use the AWS Management Console or well-documented web services APIs to access AWS’s application hosting platform.
4. SCALABLE AND HIGH PERFORMANCE - Auto Scaling, and Elastic Load Balancing, your application can scale up or down based on demand. Backed by Amazon’s massive infrastructure, you have access to compute and storage resources when you need them.
5. SECURE - It utilizes an end-to-end approach to secure and harden our infrastructure, including physical, operational, and software measures. For more information, see the AWS Security Center.
6. COST - EFFECTIVE - You pay only for the compute power, storage, and other resources you use, with no long-term contracts or up-front commitments. For more information on comparing the costs of other hosting alternatives with AWS, see the AWS Economics Center.

AWS has 76 availability zones in which its servers are located. These serviced regions are divided in order to allow users to set geographical limits on their services (if they so choose), but also to provide security by diversifying the physical locations in which data is held. Overall, AWS spans 245 countries and territories.

So to understand more, let's do the case study of one of the Top Customer of AWS named as "NASA".

NASA Case Study-

About NASA-

NASA is a United States government agency that is responsible for science and technology related to air and space. The Space Age started in 1957 with the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik. NASA was created in 1958. The agency was created to oversee U.S. space exploration and aeronautics research.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has been working around the world—and off of it—for almost 60 years, trying to answer some basic questions: What’s out there in space? How do we get there? What will we find? What can we learn there, or learn just by trying to get there, that will make life better here on Earth?

Exploring Space: No Rocket Science Degree Needed-

Have you ever looked up at night and wondered about the mysteries of space?

Or marveled at the expansiveness of our galaxy?

We can easily explore all this and more at the NASA Image and Video Library, which provides easy access to more than 140,000 still images, audio recordings, and videos—documenting NASA’s more than half a century of achievements in exploring the vast unknown. For NASA, providing the public with such easy access to the wonders of space has been a journey all its own.

Can you imagine, NASA began providing online access to photos, video, and audio in the early 2000’s, when media capture began to shift from analog and film to digital. Before long, each of NASA’s 10 field centers was making its imagery available online, including digitized versions of some older assets.

Now therein was some challenges-

“With media in so many different places, you needed institutional knowledge of NASA to know where to look,”

--says Rodney Grubbs,

(Imagery Experts Program Manager at NASA)

• “If you wanted a video of the space shuttle launch, you had to go to the Kennedy Space Center website. If you wanted pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, you went to the Goddard Space Flight Center website. With 10 different centers and dozens of distributed image collections, it took a lot of digging around to find what you wanted.”

There Early efforts to provide a one-stop shop consisted of essentially “scraping” content from the different sites, bringing it together in one place, and layering a search engine on top.

 “In large part, those initial efforts were unsuccessful because each center categorized its imagery in different ways,”

--says Grubbs.

“As a result, we often had five to six copies of the same image, each described in different ways, which made searches difficult and delivered a poor user experience.”

In 2011, NASA decided that the best approach to address this issue was to start over. By late 2014, all the necessary pieces for a second attempt were in place-

• The Imagery Experts Program had developed and published a common metadata standard, which all NASA’s centers had adopted.
• The Web Enterprise Service Technologies (WESTPrime) service contract, one of five agency-wide service contracts under NASA’s Enterprise Services program, provided a delivery vehicle for building and managing the new site.
• The Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), which provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services.

“By 2014, like with many government agencies, NASA was trying to get away from buying hardware and building data centers, which are expensive to build and manage. The cloud also provided the ability to scale with ease, as needed, paying for only the capacity we use instead of having to make a large up-front investment.”

"“We wanted to build our new solution in the cloud for two reasons,” says Grubbs"

Decades of NASA Achievements – All in One Place-

Then the development of the new NASA Image and Video Library was handled by the Web Services Office within NASA’s Enterprise Service and Integration Division. Technology selection, solution design, and implementation was managed by InfoZen (acquired by and now operating as ManTech International), the WESTPrime contract service provider. As an Advanced Consulting Partner of the AWS Partner Network (APN), ManTech International chose to build the solution on Amazon Web Services (AWS). “Amazon was the largest cloud services provider, had a strong government cloud presence, and offered the most suitable cloud in terms of elasticity,” recalls Sandeep Shilawat, Cloud Program Manager at ManTech International.

NASA formally launched its Image and Video Library in March 2017. Key features include:

• A user interface that automatically scales for PCs, tablets, and mobile phones across virtually every browser and operating system.
• A search interface that lets people easily find what they’re looking for, including the ability to choose from gallery view or list view and to narrow-down search results by media type and/or by year.
• The ability to easily download any media found on the site—or share it on Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, or Google+.
• Access to the metadata associated with each asset, such as file size, file format, which center created the asset, and when it was created. When available, users can also view EXIF/camera data for still images such as exposure, shutter speed, and lens used.
• An application programming interface (API) for automated uploads of new content—including integration with NASA’s existing authentication mechanism.

Then they deployed there server in top of the AWS. Let's see the architecture of the NASA in AWS.

Architecture-

The NASA Image and Video Library is a cloud-native solution, with the front-end web app separated from the backend API. It runs as immutable infrastructure in a fully automated environment, with all infrastructure defined in code to support continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD).

In building the solution, ManTech International took advantage of the following AWS services:

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. This enables NASA to scale up under load and scale down during periods of inactivity to save money, and pay for only what it uses.
• Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), which is used to distribute incoming traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances, as required to achieve redundancy and fault-tolerance.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which supports object storage for incoming (uploaded) media, metadata, and published assets.
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), which is used to decouple incoming jobs from pipeline processes.
• Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which is used for automatic synchronization and failover.
• Amazon DynamoDB, a fast and flexible NoSQL database service, which is used to track incoming jobs, published assets, and users.
• Amazon Elastic Transcoder, which is used to transcode audio and video to various resolutions.
• Amazon CloudSearch, which is used to support searching by free text or fields.
• Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), which is used to trigger the processing pipeline when new content is uploaded.
• AWS CloudFormation, which enables automated creation, updating, and destruction of AWS resources. ManTech International also used the Troposphere library, which enables the creation of objects via AWS CloudFormation using Python instead of hand-coded JSON—each object representing one AWS resource such as an instance, an Elastic IP (EIP) address, or a security group.
• Amazon CloudWatch, which provides a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications running on AWS.

“We now have an agile, scalable foundation on which to do all kinds of amazing things. Much like with the exploration of space, we’re just starting to imagine all that we can do with it.”

--Bryan Walls

(Imagery Experts Deputy Program Manager, NASA)

On Mars, powered by the cloud: Mars 2020 rover launches-

Aerial photograph of Mars surface

Earlier today, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched its Mars 2020 rover—Perseverance. Operated by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), the Perseverance rover will explore Mars for past signs of ancient life and collect rock and soil samples for return by a future mission.

All images returned from the mission will be hosted on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.

Naming the new Mars 2020 rover-

The Mars rover—Perseverance—got its name from a seventh-grader from Virginia. Alex Mather from Burke, Virginia submitted the winning name and essay in NASA’s “Name the Rover” essay contest earlier this year. AWS provided Alex and his family a trip to see the launch from Cape Canaveral. AWS also distributed science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) prize packs for the nine contest finalists.

Sending your name to outer space-

In 2019, individuals around the world submitted their names to be inscribed on the Mars rover and sent 300 million miles away to Mars. names were stenciled on three chips that will fly aboard the Mars Perseverance rover. Nearly 11 million people submitted their names worldwide, from 237 countries and territories and from all 50 U.S. states. Turkey ranking first in submissions, followed by India and the U.S.

The “Name the Rover” essay contest as well as the “The Send Your Name to Mars” campaign used a serverless website design on AWS, which provides reliability, high performance, and seamless scalability. AWS is also the cloud provider for all the Mars mission websites, including Perseverance.

"To scale to meet the demand of the contest, NASA JPL used Amazon CloudFront to access Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), then using Lambda@Edge to return the index.html. Amazon API Gateway dispatches requests to a number of AWS Lambda functions for create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) functions. Amazon DynamoDB is used as a data store to support the various legacy system query requirements. The site scaled with 67,000 requests per minute at peak."

NASA also uses AWS to protect life and infrastructure on earth -

• NASA is using unsupervised learning and anomaly detection to explore the extreme conditions associated with solar superstorms.
• NASA is working with AWS Professional Services and the Amazon Machine Learning (ML) Solutions Lab to use unsupervised learning and anomaly detection to explore the extreme conditions associated with superstorms. The Amazon ML Solutions Lab is a program that enables AWS customers to connect with machine learning experts within Amazon.
• NASA uses Amazon SageMaker to train an anomaly detection model using the built-in AWS Random Cut Forest Algorithm (RCF) with heliophysics datasets compiled from various ground- and satellite-based instruments. Anomalies are easy to describe in that, when viewed in a plot, they are often easily distinguishable from the more typical data. With each data point, RCF associates an anomaly score. Low score values indicate that the data point is considered normal. High values indicate the presence of an anomaly in the data.

Amazon Kinesis Firehose, can stream real-time data into Amazon S3 is used for record delivery and schema conversion to Parquet. In addition to real-time alerting, the model results are persistently stored in Amazon S3 where they can be further analyzed using Amazon SageMaker and visualized with Amazon QuickSight, which allows for the creation and publishing of interactive dashboards that include ML Insights.

With Amazon, we can take every single piece of data that we have on superstorms, and use anomalies to improve the models that predict and classify superstorms effectively.

--Janet Kozyra, Heliophysicist, NASA

"THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR READING THIS ARTICLE!!"

"AND A WARM THANK YOU TO THE WORLD RECORD HOLDER SIR MR. VIMAL DAGA FOR GIVING ME THIS OPPURTUNITY!!"