Overview

The EWC Community Hub is a centralized platform where EWC users can discover, evaluate, select and deploy items and services for the European Meteorological Community.

It's made of three main parts:

  • Community Hub Items, which are open-source and made of different technologies like Infrastructure as Code (IaC), instance configuration blueprints, containerized applications, algorithms, datasets and documentation... all open and tailored to the EWC.
  • Community Hub Dashboard, where you can discover all these items, filter them and identify what fits best your needs.
  • Community Hub Tooling & Documentation, which support users on the use of the items depending on the different technologies.

The EWC Community Hub in simple words wants to boost collaboration within the EWC users, reducing duplicated effort and accelerating the time to results.















(EWC Community Hub Overview)

Benefits

More specifically, the EWC Community Hub aims to deliver benefits on the following key areas:

  • Engagement and collaboration: Foster collaboration among EWC users of EUMETSAT & ECMWF Member and Co-Operating States.​
  • Improve usability: Cloud technologies tailored for meteorological applications.​
  • Reduce redundant effort: Reuseable and community-vetted Items that help you avoid redundant development.​
  • Foster learning: Practical examples and self-training on cloud technologies or exploration of use-cases that run natively in the EWC.​
  • Turn legacy software into cloud-compatible solutions: Existing software turned into cloud-native tools, through shared contributions

Roles

As a community effort, everyone can play a part (or several parts) on the Community Hub. Roles align with audiences, ensuring contributors retain ownership while admins (ECMWF & EUMETSAT staff) oversee quality without maintenance responsibilities:

AudienceRoles
EveryoneBrowse, utilize Items
EWC UsersAll of the above + Apply Items directly in EWC tenancies
EWC ContributorsAll of the above + Contribute and maintain Items; Engage with the community
EWC AdminsAll of the above + Approve/remove Items; Provide guidance and guard-rails; Maintain only EWC Items


Community Hub Items

Key Concepts

Item

In the context of the EWC Community Hub, the term "Item" simply refers to an unit of functionality that can be shared and reused. In more technical terms, its a self-contained, versioned, open-source repository, with the sole purpose of helping others deploy, configure, or integrate solutions within their own EWC tenancy. Every item can use different type of technologies. The list of technologies evolves as the community grows and the platform matures. You can find the currently considered and future supported Item Technologies on this page. 

Item Metadata

All relevant information pertinent to an Item, its operation, terms of use and owner/maintainer. It is stored and shared in a structured text format (YAML), required for correct indexing of an Item into the EWC Community Hub catalogue and proper rendering on the EWC Community Hub Dashboard.

Item Deployability

Items fall into two general groupings:

  • Deployable: Make it easy to get started by offering "one-click" or "one-command" install functionality. These can be deployed via:
    • 3rd-party open-source tools like Ansible, OpenTofu
    • in some cases, via ewccli, EWC's own command line interface
  • Non-deployable: These are supporting resources like jupyter notebooks, documentation or libraries to integrate into your workflows, or pointers to datasets.

Community Hub Dashboard

To get started, take a quick tour through the EWC Community Hub Dashboard. Use the search bar to find Items by keywords like "ECMWF data", apply filters for technologies (e.g., Ansible Playbook), and click an Item card to view details and usage instructions. No additional tools are needed for exploring. To learn about these and all other dashboard functionalities by visiting this page.

Content and Architecture

The EWC Community Hub Dashboard content is publicly hosted on GitHub, at https://github.com/ewcloud/ewc-community-hub. It contains metadata for each Item, including links to the locations where contributors keep the Items themselves. The EWC Community Hub Dashboard, integrated into the EWC portal, fetches this data at regular intervals, and renders it for a user-friendly display. 

Contribute to the Community Hub

If you want to learn how you can contribute to the EWC Community Hub, checkout the Contributing to the Community Hub guide. 

Community Hub Tooling

Depending on the technology/technologies of the item, you need to use different type of technologies. Some of the featured Item's support "one-command" deployment out-of-the-box, while others which lack this functionality, can achieve it if consumed via of the ewccli. To learn about Item consumption and deployment requirements, visit this page.

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