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The European Weather Cloud (EWC) is connecting connects the cloud environments of ECMWF and EUMETSAT into a larger entity, providing seamless unified access to online data, functions, and services from both organisations. The key feature of he the EWC is the provisioning of data proximate computing facilities to the meteorological community to boost their developments., ease access to large datasets and potentially support their operational services

The EWC is available for Member and Co-Operating States of EUMETSAT and ECMWF for Official Duty Use (NMHS, or groups of NMHSs, and other nominated organisations , for Official Duties), EUMETSAT SAFs, European meteorological organisations carrying official duties), as well as a number of identified purposes in support of EUMETSAT and ECMWF's mission (e.g. , EUMETNET), and research entities aligned with EUMETSAT's and ECMWF's missionusage by the EUMETSAT Satellite Application Facilities, or in the context of specific annual R&D calls or calls for special projects).

The service consists of cloud resources provided by EUMETSAT and ECMWF and controlled by the a cloud management software Morpheus. Users portal hosted at both ECMWF and EUMETSAT. Users are given an account (tenancy) on one of these portals, and can deploy and manage their virtual machines (VM) resources and the application environment environments to both clouds cloud infrastructures (EUMETSAT and ECMWF) regardless of the home location of their tenancy location.

Users deploy their own applications and are responsible of for the maintenance and the application environment operated they operate in the EWC. Terms and Conditions including eligibility to use the service, roles, and responsibilities are available at: Terms and Conditions for the Use of European Weather Cloud Operational Service

Cloud Management Services

EWC also offers services for cloud management. These are provided via the Morpheus API/GUI (see https://morpheusdata.com/ for general information).

Virtual environment provisioning

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  • Tenant Provisioning: EWC allows the provisioning of a set of resources to a tenant administrator (in the remaining referred only as tenant).
  • Virtual Machines: Tenantscan deploy VMs, and have full control over the deployed VMs, on the resources allocated to them. The resources used by this infrastructure are taken from the ones allocated to the organization (billing unit budget & quota). Users also have the option of cloning VMs, which provides them with an identical deployment to one already running.
  • Virtual Private Networking: Tenants can deploy virtual networks inside their tenancy, to isolate traffic between VMs. EWC offers, as part of this service, virtual routing, security groups, floating IPs and DNS services.
  • Load Balancer: EWC tenants can also deploy a load balancing service that allows them to balance the traffic between two or more VMs.
  • Block Storage provisioning: Users can provision block storage volumes, which can be mounted to a single VM at the time.
  • Object Storage provisioning: Tenants can deploy object storage capacity as buckets and store their data into in these buckets. Tenants can create access keys with read-only or read-write permissions and control the access at bucket level (using bucket policies) and object level (using ACL). The access can be restricted to the tenancy or specific IP-address/range, accessible from the internet, or the buckets or objects can be made public. The object storage supports SWIFT- and S3-interface and public buckets with also https-interface.
  • Shared File System provisioning: Users can provision Shared File System (SFS) storage, which can be mounted to several VMs simultaneously within the tenancy.

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Users can define tasks containing shell scripts and ansible Ansible playbooks. This functionality enables users to deploy their infrastructure as code, including software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment functionalities. The tasks can include runtime and provisional workflows. Tasks and workflows can be executed in the running VMs or during deployment respectively. The workflow execution can be triggered from the UI and from the CLI / Rest API. The tasks and workflows can be fetched from user-defined GIT repository via integrations.

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Morpheus can store secrets, through a built-in functionality that is also integrated with the shell and ansible Ansible scripts described in the previous section. Morpheus offers this functionality through Cypher. The stored secrets can be revoked either manually or automatically after a timeout.

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The European Weather Cloud Accounting and Metering Service (hereafter referred as Accounting Service) provides a cross-cloud overview of resource usage of tenancies and Member States.

The accounting tool provides visualization tools including metrics, time series, graphs, and dashboards of all the accounting data gathered for end users, in the form of a GUI.

Expected service level

Following The following service level objectives are is expected:

99% services , etc99% on-board

Service Element

Description

Target

Notes

Infrastructure

Expected availability of deployments and reachability of the VM/service

The availability of the deployed resources including the whole virtual environment explained above. This availability also includes the reachability of the VM/service from the Internet. 

99.5%

Measured over a month, excluding planned service interruptions. Maintenance windows are announced in EWC KB Blog

Availability of Cloud Management Services

(see above)

The EWC tools such as the provisioning portal, metering and accounting services

.

99.5%

Measured over a month, excluding planned service interruptions. Maintenance windows are announced in EWC KB Blog

Support

Time to first response 

Lead time to respond to the ticket and start the task

1 day on business hours

 

Time to resolution plan of service request

Time to assessment and to the resolution plan of the service request including support requests and service change requests8 business days

Time to resolution of incident

Time to the resolution of the incidents

1 business day for blocking incidents

3 business days for major incidents


Lead time to on-board

Lead time to

onboard an approved new user counted from the approval by the Computing Representative / R&D project and Special Project acceptance

3 business days (after approval)

 

Acronyms and definitions

AcronymDefinition
EWCEuropean Weather Cloud
ECMWF European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts
EUMETSATEuropean Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites
NMHSNational Meteorological and Hydrological Service
SAFEUMETSAT Satellite Application Facility
EUMETNEThttps://www.eumetnet.eu/
VM Virtual Machine
APIApplication programming interface
GUIGraphical user interface
UIUser interface
CLICommand line interface
DNSDomain name server
S3 Simple storage system
GITVersion Control System
Cypher Secret Management System in Morpheus
EWC KBEWC Knowledge base

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