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The European Weather Cloud (EWC) is connecting connects the cloud environment environments of ECMWF and EUMETSAT into a larger entity, providing seamless unified access to online data, functions, and services from both organisations. The The key assets feature of the EWC are to provide is the provisioning of data proximate computing facilities and to the meteorological community to boost the development.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 mission and EUMETSAT Member Stateusage 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 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 the 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:https: //confluence.ecmwf.int/display/EWCLOUDKB/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 a 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 between their VMs, which balance 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 the in these buckets. Tenants can create access keys with read-only or read-write permissions and control the access on 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 enable enables users deploying to deploy their infrastructure as code, including software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment functionalityfunctionalities. 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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Blueprints and Instance types

Morpheus provides the capability to create applications defined as ‘blueprints’ containing one or more VMs with possibly pre-installed software, pre-defined provisional workflows, network setup, and other resources. Users can create their own blueprints and instance types and/or use the catalogue. Notably, users are responsible for the maintenance and updates of all deployed instances and applications regardless of their origin (e.g. instance selected from the catalogue). Updates on the applications in the catalogue are not applied to the already running applications.

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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:

Service Element

Description

Target

Notes

Infrastructure

Expected availability of deployments and reachability of the VM/service

Reachability of the very simple service (e.g. ping) deployed into the EWC, probed from

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%

99.5%

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

Availability of

operational EWC services

Cloud Management Services (see above)

 

The EWC

(

tools such as the provisioning portal,

storage services, etc.) shall be available at least 99% of the time (excluding the scheduled maintenance windows), measured

metering and accounting services.

99.5%

Measured over a month, excluding planned service interruptions.

99%

Maintenance windows are announced in EWC KB Blog

Support

Time to first

response

response 

Lead time to respond to the ticket and start the task

1d

1 day on business hours

 

Time to resolution plan of service request

8 business days

Time to resolution of incident

1 business day for blocking, 3 business days for major
Time to assessment and to the resolution plan of the service request including support requests and service change requests8 business days

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