NASA expects Amazon Web Services to provide 215 excess petabytes of storage by the year 2025. However, NASA didn’t expect that they would have to bear plenty in cloud egress charges whenever scientists download its data.
The data consists of information from many missions that observe our planet. The data comes NASA’s Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS) program. The space agency makes the availability of reading with the help of the Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS).
NASA manages several Distributed Active Archive Centers to store all the data and run EOSDIS. The DAACSs provide pleasing redundancy. In 2019 NASA picked AWS to host all records as the space agency was tired of managing all that infrastructure. NASA’s data was migrated to Amazon’s cloud as part of a project named Earthdata Cloud. The agency is predicted to deliver more than 100 terabytes of data each day from 15 imminent missions, such as the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR) and the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellites.
The agency currently handles over 32 petabytes of data which is expected to increase to 247 petabytes by 2025. Scientific data may become less available to end-users if NASA forces restrictions on the amount of data egress for cost control reasons.
On top of NASA’s $65m-per-year deal with AWS, the audit hints an increased cloud spend of around $30m a year by 2025.
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