NASA Nearly Saves $1M Per Year Using Amazon Web Services(AWS)??...

??About NASA...

Established in 1958, 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?

??About Amazon Web Services...??

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering around 2500+ services such as compute, databases, and storage.

?Some salient features of AWS Cloud computing can be stated as follows:

1. Ease of Use: AWS provides a very user-friendly interface called the AWS Management Console. This server interface provides access to a wide number of applications and services.
2. A diverse array of Services: While it was initially meant for cloud storage and computing, it has expanded to around 2500+ services categorized as Compute-as-a-Service, Storage-as-a-Service, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service, and various other applications for Machine Learning, Mobile Platforms, and caters to each and every enhanced need of the current industry.
3. Unlimited Server Capacity: There’s basically no IT-based need that your business has, that AWS cannot handle. Even better, you can expand or grow as you wish, without worrying about service disruption. This unlimited capacity is why AWS rules the cloud computing space.
4. Flexibility and Affordability: The “pay-as-you-go” facility of AWS makes it quite affordable for the users and it comes in handy for small businesses on tight budgets looking to grow without paying a small fortune for the web services.
5. Reliable Encryption and Security: AWS provides a more reliable security measure that’s guaranteed to keep your data safe and secure.

??Difference between Traditional Infrastructure and AWS Cloud:

1. The “pay-as-you-go” facility of AWS makes it quite affordable than the significant long term contracts in the traditional model.
2. Also, the cloud provides far better Disaster Recovery Management and Security options than the traditional infrastructure enabled.

?? Challenges faced by NASA before using Cloud Services:

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.

 “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.”

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.”

?? Why NASA chose Amazon Web Services?? ?

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 finally launched its Image and Video Library in March 2017 using AWS, which turned out to be a GAME CHANGER for them...??

??Key features of the Image and Video Library:

?? 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.

??Amazon Web Services used by NASA for building the Image & Video Library??...

?? Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2):

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):

Used to distribute incoming traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances, as required to achieve redundancy and fault-tolerance.

??Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3):

Supports object storage for incoming (uploaded) media, metadata, and published assets.

??Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS):

Used to decouple incoming jobs from pipeline processes.

?? Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS):

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:

Used to transcode audio and video to various resolutions.

?? Amazon CloudSearch:

Used to support searching by free text or fields.

?? Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS):

Used to trigger the processing pipeline when new content is uploaded.

?? AWS CloudFormation:

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:

Provides a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications running on AWS.

??Architecture of the library...??

By the use of AWS, with support from ManTech International, NASA is making its vast wealth of pictures, videos, and audio files—previously in some 60 “collections” across NASA’s 10 centers—easily discoverable in one centralized location

By building its Image and Video Library in the cloud, NASA avoided the costs associated with deploying and maintaining server and storage hardware in-house. Instead, the agency can simply pay for the AWS resources it uses at any given time.

“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