🤔 What is AWS & NASA Case Study.

In this article we will discuss about what is the meaning of cloud computing? And what is AWS and NASA case study

What is ☁️ Cloud Computing ?

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage (cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. The term is generally used to describe data centers available to many users over the Internet.

Who provide the cloud Services they are known as the Cloud Service Providers.

Here is a list of my top 10 cloud service providers:

1. Amazon Web Services (AWS)
2. Microsoft Azure
3. Google Cloud
4. Alibaba Cloud
5. IBM Cloud
6. Oracle
7. Salesforce
8. SAP
9. Rackspace Cloud
10. VMWare

In this article we will discuss about Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Amazon Web services (AWS):

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform, offering over 175 fully featured services from data centers globally. Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—are using AWS to lower costs, become more agile, and innovate faster.

AWS is the top most Cloud Service Provider

Why AWS is Leading Cloud Plateform?

Most functionality:

• AWS has significantly more services, and more features within those services, than any other cloud provider–from infrastructure technologies like compute, storage, and databases–to emerging technologies, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, data lakes and analytics, and Internet of Things.
• This makes it faster, easier, and more cost effective to move your existing applications to the cloud and build nearly anything you can imagine.

Most secure:

• AWS is architected to be the most flexible and secure cloud computing environment available today.
• AWS supports 90 security standards and compliance certifications, and all 117 AWS services that store customer data offer the ability to encrypt that data

Global network of AWS Regions:

• AWS has the most extensive global cloud infrastructure. No other cloud provider offers as many Regions with multiple Availability Zones connected by low latency, high throughput, and highly redundant networking.

• AWS has 77 Availability Zones within 24 geographic regions around the world, and has announced plans for nine more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan, and Spain.

Pricing:

• AWS offers you a pay-as-you-go approach for pricing for over 160 cloud services. With AWS you pay only for the individual services you need, for as long as you use them, and without requiring long-term contracts or complex licensing.
• AWS pricing is you only pay for the services you consume, and once you stop using them, there are no additional costs or termination fees.

Cloud Products:

Amazon Web Services offers a broad set of global cloud-based products including compute, storage, databases, analytics, networking, mobile, developer tools, management tools, IoT, security and enterprise applications.

Not only this AWS provide many other services, so it is leading the cloud platform .

Now let’s come to our case study . In this article we will discuss about NASA Case Study.

Case Study of NASA:

🤔 What is NASA ?

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?

Exploring space:

Have you ever looked up at night and wondered about the mysteries of space? Or marveled at the expansiveness of our galaxy? You 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.

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.

Challenges the NASA face before moving to AWS:

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

Rodney Grubbs is a Imagery Experts Program Manager at NASA. He says like this: “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.”

Here the problem is did you want information or institutional knowledge about NASA you had to go different websites and collect the data from those website’s. It’s a one major problem of NASA

NASA took one step forward to overcome this problem:

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.

NASA Experience with AWS:

• 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,” .

Services Provided by AWS to NASA:

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.

• Amazon CloudWatch: which provides a monitoring service for AWS cloud resources and the applications running on AWS.

Let’s see what benifits the NASA experienced with AWS:

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.

Hope you found this post to be informative 👍. Thank you so much for taking your precious time to read this post😊.

Keep learning ✌️