Cloud in the Space (GaaS)

Satellite business owners need to manage the satellite from the Ground Station which requires lot of time to build and huge amount of Capex to invest. Not to mention the integration and the complexity of IT they need to deal with.

In the era of Cloud computing, where startups and successful businesses like Uber, Netflix etc. are running majority of their IT in the Cloud thereby allowing them to scale their businesses and getting the best technology paying for what they use, should satellite business owners be far behind?

Ground Station as a service (GaaS or GSaaS) has been launched by AWS. The service allows to deal with Satellites as an IOT service. Onboard the device( satellite here), use a pub/sub kind of service to schedule the data delivery (Kinesis), get the data (Redshift/S3/Glacier?), process (Lambda functions?) and distribute (Pub/Sub or SNS?).

Some of the use cases which satellites deliver include weather forecasting, surveillance, IOT, LTE/5G in remote areas, surface imaging, communications, and video broadcasts.

This service coming post the AWS and Iridium agreement for Cloudconnect to offer IOT services. With this service, AWS seems to be taking the Cloud computing beyond the clouds. Reminds me of Captain Kirk log "To go where no man has gone before" or rather "to take the service where no other provider has gone before".