Migration of Institute of Geodesy and Cartography application to Amazon Web Services using AWS PoC

For Institute of Geodesy and Cartography we migrated the application to the AWS cloud using AWS Proof of Concept (PoC). Institute is responsible for conducting scientific research and implementation work in the field of geodesy, remote sensing and geomatics (including cartography) for the purposes of central and local government administration, national statistics, state security and for the development of the field of Earth Sciences.

Introduction

Remote Sensing Centre of Institute of Geodesy and Cartography (IGiK) in cooperation with Agency for Restructuring and Modernization of Agriculture (ARiMR) within the EOStat project, using resources of the European Space Agency (images provided by the Sentinel-2 satellite made available by the AWS S3 bucket) created its own application in the form of a geoportal, used for monitoring of crop phenology. It provides information about the date of emergence and harvest of the main and post-harvest crop as well as about the occurrence of soil erosion hazard. The monitoring covers agricultural parcels registered for direct payments.

The tool developed by Institute Remote Sensing Centre will be used by ARiMR to control applications for direct payments. The use of the tool by a wider audience was limited. The main reason of limitations was local environment (Institute's computers), within which the application has been working and the necessity of continuous downloading of large amounts of satellite data.

Figure 1: CIR composition taken from images of the Sentinel-2 satellite.

Figure 2: Example report for an agricultural plot showing the phenology of the main crop and the after crop.

Problem

The Remote Sensing Center IGiK contacted Hostersi looking to migrate their application to the cloud. The main goal of this migration was to automate the processes associated with the operation of the application and the ability to easily reach a wider audience. Two key issues should be noted here. Firstly, the Institute's employees had never worked in a cloud environment before, and secondly, the budget for this task was very limited.

After verifying IGIK's needs and capabilities, we jointly decided that the best solution would be to obtain AWS Proof of Concept (PoC) funding, which allowed the Institute to implement its solution within the funds allocated to it by AWS. This solution allowed us to complete all the planned activities, the Customer was able to launch its application in the cloud and realistically determine the potential scale of costs associated with its maintenance.

Application migration - implementation

The Customer's application is based on vector data overlaid on satellite images made available by the European Space Agency Sentinel-2 satellite. Python scripts based on numpy, pandas and osgeo.gdal libraries are used for this purpose. We used Amazon Lambda to run the scripts on the new infrastructure, so that all data updates automatically as soon as new satellite images are uploaded to Amazon S3. The read data is then written to a PostgreSQL spatial database with a PostGIS overlay, for which we ran an Amazon RDS relational database. A map server was run on an Amazon EC2 virtual machine to visualize the data from the PostgreSQL database. In this way, a stable and automated infrastructure was created to support the applications of the Institute of Cartography and Geodesy.

Summary

For the Institute of Geodesy and Cartography we have designed and implemented a stable and automated infrastructure to support a novel application, cooperating with the resources of the European Space Agency, located in AWS S3 bucket. Moreover, we trained Institute's employees, preparing them to work with cloud infrastructure and helped to obtain financing for new infrastructure within AWS Proof of Concept (covering 100% of costs incurred for infrastructure).

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