EarthSelf

1. Purpose

EarthSelf service enables any business or users to create new EO value-added services by offering them:

  1. Access to the SnapEarth Innovative Platform, containing:
  • The ready-to-use Multi-Cloud environment, including cutting-edge technologies and facilities allowing secured and high-performance deployment of service, hosted on European Cloud resources, to ensure the ramp-up and large-scale productions.
  • The EarthSignature database access through API, to exploit the results of the database and combining it with their own data or other data to create added value.
  1. Cloud benchmarking, through Cloud Suggest Engine service to help to choose the suitable cloud provider depending on the service creator needs.
  2. Helpdesk portal and support, to help service creators to follow up their service requests made to our platform and to support them through tutorials and documentation to deploy their services on the cloud.
     

2. Service description

The proposed SnapEarth EarthSelf-Service allows on-demand provisioning of EO data exploitation environments. Users will be able to leverage the SnapEarth EarthSignature database, the ease of access to satellite data and the highly scalable and robust infrastructure offered by EarthSelf Service to deploy their projects in the Cloud as secure services. Thanks to the powerful workflow engine integrated in the solution, complex processing chains can be published combining classical processing and artificial intelligence.
 

2.1 Ready-to-use multi-Cloud environment for secured and high-performance deployment of service

Our solution proposes a ready-to-use multi-Cloud environment for secured and high-performance deployment of service. Three built-in services offering progressive integration levels, in order to be accessible to users with various degrees of tech-savviness in the fields of infrastructure, resources provisioning, application deployment and data or storage management.

Our solution is built on the well-known Kubernetes environment and managed by SafeScale, the open source portable and secured multi cloud management solution developed by CS GROUP.

Kubernetes is the reference orchestrator for the deployment of flexible, scalable and highly available containers. Kubernetes environments deployed with SafeScale are optimized for security and operability to guarantee an irreproachable quality of service regardless of the cloud provider chosen.

Additional layer for workflow processing is proposed to allow users to quickly create operational and secure services without requiring any knowledge of neither the underlying container orchestration mechanism nor its underlying infrastructure. This layer allows them to focus on developing their individual processing tasks, using whichever technology they are the most familiar with.  Thus, users will be able to access all the services on top of this layer (such as access to the EarthSignature database API and EODAG library to access EO data). In addition, they will not have to worry about large-scale processing, (e.g. to reach national, continental or even global land cover computing areas).
 

2.2 Cloud benchmarking service

Thanks to the Cloud Suggest Engine tool, EarthSelf service offers a Cloud benchmarking facility to suggest the optimal cloud provider (performance of their infrastructure VS EO data availability) based on the expressed needs of service creators.

2.3 Helpdesk Portal

EarthSel service offers a dedicated portal which is the service web interface intended to service creators. Thanks to this portal, service creators will be able to:

  • Follow up their service requests made to our platform
    • Register their service,
    • Express their needs (choice of the deployment integration level, choice of related services: SSO authentication,..., types of data they need and the volume is needed per processing,…)
  • Manage their support tickets
  • Find help on specific topics by means of tutorials and documentation

Example (Zammad):


 

3. Service Extension

SafeScaleSnapEarth offers optional Cloud Desktop service (if agreements) to provide users with a graphical environment allowing them to prototype and fine-tune various parameters of their projects. It provides all tools involved in the analysis of EO data and the development of added value services. It is based on web technologies for a fluid, ergonomic and intuitive user experience without any deployment on the user infrastructure.

Among the optional tools:

  • A Jupiter desktop to integrate several ready to use tools, such as EO image processing libraries (SNAP, Orfeo Toolbox, …)
  • Scientific data visualization (like with PyViz tool) to make data visualizations easier to use, learn and more powerful
  • Datamining features for automatically searching large stores of data to discover patterns and trends that go beyond simple analysis
  • Distributed computing with dask, for parallel and distributed computing
  • More automatized deployment on cloud.
  • AI / machine learning tools (ex with pytorch, TensorFlow)
  • Human helpdesk with a support with qualified teams to help to build up European EO cloud projects

EarthSelf service is accessible through the following link