Blog from February, 2025

After the maintenance on EUMETSAT side of the EWC, a last intervention is still necessary for Morpheus to correctly receiving metrics and logs. You might notice that some of the health checks reports from your VMs are not in a healthy state. However, this issue is only related to the way in which Morpheus shows this information, and your workloads are actually fine. We are working on a solution and will provide more information as soon as possible.

We would like to also highlight that if you notice issues with running workflows or deploying instances in your tenancy, the LDAP VM might need to be restarted. If this doesn't resolve the problem please contact us in rocketchat or through support ticket.




Since we started this journey, and as we have evolved our EWC offering, certain aspects of the overall experience had started to slowly diverge on both sides of the EWC. Based on feedback received by our users, ECMWF and EUMETSAT EWC Teams have embarked in a process to harmonise the user experience from users, regardless of what side of the EWC they work on. 

We focused on identifying and analysing any differences in terms of infrastructure, setup, support and use cases and started to consolidate the approaches and offering wherever possible. As a result, you may have already noticed some work being done in several key areas:

Documentation

We have reviewed all our articles in our Knowledge base and made sure all the instructions applied to both cloud backends, wherever possible. Certain pages with similar instructions for both backends have been generalised, simplified or merged.

Outreach & Training

It is not something new, but we plan to continue to offer joint EWC Training and Tutorials, including webinars and events like the User Workshop.

Morpheus experience

While we keep both ECMWF and EUMETSAT Morpheus portals to access and manage your virtual infrastructure at EWC, some work is ongoing to bring the interaction with them as close as possible, converging in similar default setup and naming conventions for the same elements.

VM images

We now share a common set of base Virtual Machine images featuring Rocky Linux and Ubuntu across the EWC, and aim to jointly release any updates to them when needed.

EWC common community templates

A great deal of effort has been invested to ensure that common templates, instance types and workflows are consistent and can work on both sides.

Openstack API access

For those users wanting to automate their deployments and have finer control over their infrastructure, we have recently jointly announced the access to the cloud backends directly.  Beyond the unavoidable minor differences from the different cloud providers, the process and experience when using this approach should be symmetric from the user point of view.


Looking ahead, the evolution of EWC underlying cloud infrastructure in the next years will continue to take into account all these harmonisation aspects in order to continue to offer users a consistent view and experience across the EWC. Behind the scenes, a major effort is underway towards the development of the new services coming up from the features roadmap, where we hope we can continue to deliver value for this community. 

Dear all,

this is just a reminder for the maintenance starting today on EUMETSAT side of the EWC. In case of any questions, comments, or concerns, please contact us via our Support Portal or Discussion Platform.

Kind regards,

EWC Team at EUMETSAT side

Start [UTC]: 12/03/2025 09:00
End [UTC]: 12/03/2025 10:00

The European Weather Cloud (EWC) teams at ECMWF and EUMETSAT are pleased to invite you to the first thematic EWC webinar of 2025.

It will happen on Wednesday 12 March 2025 from 09:00 to 10:00 UTC.

These recurring thematic webinars are aimed at new or prospective users of the EWC service, provided by EUMETSAT and ECMWF, which is available to all ECMWF and EUMETSAT Member and Co-operating States. Our primary objective is to provide guidance to users on how to effectively use the different capabilities of the EWC.

Information on the previous webinars, including their recordings, can be found here

In this webinar, we focus on how to access Openstack API using Openstack Application Credentials in EWC. This recently announced feature addresses the needs of use cases requiring process automation and supports Infrastructure as Code (IaC) implementations.

By the end of this 1-hour session, participants will have gained a better understanding of how to access the service, its basic features and how to use some of the most common commands of the Openstack command line interface including how to create a new server.

Attendance

Please note that the webinar is open to anyone interested from an ECMWF or EUMETSAT Member and Co-operating State. 

If you would like to attend the webinar, please complete the registration: https://events.ecmwf.int/event/459/registrations/321/

We will alert you of your acceptance to the webinar and send you all the joining information and Microsoft Teams meeting details in due course.

The webinar will be conducted in English.

We are delighted to announce that OpenStack API access is now available for the provisioned EWC cloud infrastructures at ECMWF and EUMETSAT.

This new feature addresses the needs of use cases requiring process automation and supports Infrastructure as a Code (IaaC) implementations.

If you’re interested in gaining access, please follow the instructions provided here: EWC - How to Request OpenStack Application Credentials.

For more details and documentation, visit the EWC Knowledge Base: EWC - OpenStack API Access.

We’ll be organizing a training session on this topic in the near future. Stay tuned for more details!

Should you need any assistance or have any feedback, feel free to reach out via the EWC Support Portal or contact us on the EWC Discussion Platform.

Best Regards,

The EWC team

Dear all,


The infrastructure provider at the EUMETSAT side of the EWC announced an upcoming maintenance window that will be starting on 18 February 2025 at 21:00 UTC and finishing on 19 February 2025 at 04:00 UTC to stabilize the infrastructure and network.


During that maintenance window, there will be total unavailability of the services (with shutdown and unavailability of all running virtual instances).

If you want to ensure a graceful shutdown of your application, please shut down your applications before the maintenance window. Otherwise, no actions are needed from your side.


We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause. In case of any questions, comments, or concerns, please contact us via our Support Portal or Discussion Platform.


Kind regards,


EWC Team at EUMETSAT side