ESA’s ‘EO Exploitation Platforms Common Architecture’ initiative aims to facilitate adoption of a freely available common architecture that supports a paradigm shift from “bring the data to the user” (i.e. user downloads data locally) to “bring the user to the data” (i.e. move user exploitation to hosted environments with collocated computing and storage). This leads to a platform-based ecosystem that provides infrastructure, data, computing and software as a service. The resulting Exploitation Platform is where scientific and value-adding activities are conducted, to generate targeted outputs for end-users.

In order to unite the existing and future resources into an ‘EO Network of Resources’ (NoR), there is a motivation to define standard interfaces that facilitate the federation and interoperation of these scattered resources – allowing the user to efficiently access and consume the disparate services of the ‘EO NoR’.

The focus of the Common Architecture is to define an open architecture using open interfaces that facilitate the federation and interoperation of services in the ‘EO NoR’, allowing the user to efficiently access and consume these disparate NoR services.

Additionally, Telespazio UK will lead a team to develop a Reference Implementation of the architecture for deployment as an operational service.

The EOEPCA project has documented a set of exploitation platform use cases, from which a system architecture for an exploitation platform has been designed. Feedback is sought and appreciated on these two documents. The architecture is defined as a set of building blocks with open interfaces that are organised into functional domain areas.

The Telespazio UK system team, supported by STFC and EARSC, has been joined by domain experts from Deimos (User Management) and Terradue (Processing & Chaining) to implement a Reference Implementation of the Common Architecture. The team will be completed with the addition of Resource Management domain experts and operators to provide an operational service that uses the reference implementation components, to obtain user feedback and so refine the architecture.

The Reference Implementation is an open source agile development that follows the principles of DevOps, relying upon a toolchain that includes Jira, GitHub, Travis-CI, DockerHub, Terraform, Ansible and Kubernetes.