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 Team started the Teams have embarked in a process to harmonize as much as possible the EWC User harmonise the user experience from users on both sides. They started to focus on , 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 harmonized where was possible. Specifically the EWC manged to harmonize
- documentation
- morpheus VM images
- EWC community templates
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 The evolution of EWC underlying cloud infrastructure coming up in the next years is also taking into account this harmonization part in order to give users an harmonized view on the EWC. Moreover they worked on generalizing and simplifying the EWC knowledge base to facilitate its use across both sites. A major effort has also been undertaken 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.