Blog

EUMETSAT EWC Morpheus update

We are updating the cloud management platform Morpheus at the EUMETSAT side of the EWC on 14 November at 20:00 -- 21:30 CET. During the update, Morpheus will not be available. The update does not affect any running workloads. 

We were experiencing issues at the EUMETSAT side of the EWC, around 16:20 - 17:30. Any VMs may have been affected. Everything should be recovered but VM restarts might be needed. We are continuing the analysis with our provider. Please report us via https://jira.ecmwf.int/servicedesk/customer/portal/9 or https://chat.europeanweather.cloud if you experiencing any problems. 

We apologise for the inconvenience!


Dear all,

We would like to inform you of an upcoming upgrade of Morpheus backend on EUMETSAT side of the EWC. This update is required to prepare for a major upgrade of Morpheus that will be performed in the following weeks, fixing some issues and improving performance and security. 

Maintenance Window:

  • Date: 5 November 2024
  • TIme: 20:00 - 21:00 CET 


What to Expect:

  • This maintenance is not expected to impact your workloads. However, you may notice slight performance reductions or minor increases in latency within Morpheus.


We appreciate your understanding and patience as we work to enhance your experience. Our team will be actively monitoring the platform to ensure everything runs smoothly.  

For any questions or comments or issues, please contact us via support ticket (https://support.europeanweather.cloud) or via Rocket.


Thank you,

EWC Team EUMETSAT side

Dear all ,

we have noticed a current bug in the Morpheus on EUMETSAT side when you try to deploy a machine.  Occasionally, it will appear from the UI as if your machine is ready, in a running state and healthy (and you will also get an email on provisioning "completion", if you have that enabled) but in reality the machine didn't even start the provisioning. You can check if it's happened by going to the console tab on a newly provisioned VM - if no console appears, most likely the VM didn't provision. Alternatively you check the history and see than nothing happened to the VM

This bug is known to Morpheus and it will be addressed in the next major release planned before the end of the year. Meanwhile the only solution possible if you see this, is to delete the failed VM and start a new provisioning. 

We apologize for any inconvenience this irritating bug causes and thanks for all users reporting it.

For any questions or comments or issues, please contact us via support ticket (https://support.europeanweather.cloud) or via Rocket.


Dear all,

We are implementing changes to EUMETCast Terrestrial to reduce the risk of the very high data flow rates overloading internal network components at our cloud provider. While improvements there are underway, we have transitioned the EWC EUMETCast Terrestrial templates to use public IP addresses, which take another network path that is better able to scale up. This update has been thoroughly tested and validated with public IPs.

The process is documented here for creating new EUMETCast Terrestrial VMs, : https://confluence.ecmwf.int/display/EWCLOUDKB/How+to+use+EUMETCast+Terrestrial+on+AMT and for existing VMs, please follow the instructions provided here : https://confluence.ecmwf.int/display/EWCLOUDKB/Updating+existing+Eumetcast+Terrestrial+VMs+to+use+public+IPs

If you have any questions or need assistance, don’t hesitate to reach out to our support team.

Best regards,

EWC Team


Dear all !


We are pleased to announce the availability of new updated images with all security patches at both ECMWF and EUMETSAT side of the cloud for

  • Rocky Linux 9.4
  • Rocky Linux 8.10
  • Ubuntu 22.04

You can already deploy the new images from Morpheus using same instance types already available.

As always, if you need any support, please do get in touch with us on rocketchat or through the European Weather Cloud Support Portal (https://support.europeanweather.cloud/).

Kind regards,

EWC Team

Dear EWC Users,

The new EWC user workshop is approaching ( https://europeanweather.cloud/events/european-weather-cloud-user-workshop-13-november-2024 ) and you can already register at: https://eumetsat.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIud-CsqDkiGNK9zHFl_KD3NFjR46eiPRC9#/registration !

As normal, we will briefly cover general and new aspects of the EWC and give the floor to current users with interesting use cases. We are currently preparing the agenda for the workshop and we would like to invite anyone that's interested in presenting their experiences and work in the EWC to contact us.

If you are interested to present your existing or planned use case, please get in touch with us via the European Weather Cloud Support Portal at https://support.europeanweather.cloud/

EWC Team

 

Dear all ,

EUMETSAT side of the EWC announced a maintenance on 24 September 2024 08:00-12:00 CEST for the upgrade of Morpheus, the Cloud Management Platform.

During the maintenance, Morpheus can be unavailable, but your workloads will keep running and won't be affected.
In case of any questions or comments or issues, please contact us via support (https://jira.ecmwf.int/servicedesk/customer/portal/9/) or via Rocket.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Dear all
We are experiencing issues at the EUMETSAT side of the EWC when deploying new VMs. We are investigating the problem and will update as soon as we know more.

We apologize for the inconvenience this might cause to you!

We are experiencing issues at the EUMETSAT side of the EWC. We are investigating the problem and will update as soon as we know more.

We apologies the inconvenience this might cause to you!


The European Weather Cloud (EWC) teams at ECMWF and EUMETSAT are pleased to announce a refreshed EWC website has been released: https://europeanweather.cloud


This website aims to be the reference and starting point of the journey in the EWC, both for existing and prospective users, as well as general public who wish to know more about this initiative.

The content has been expanded and reorganised, highlighting the key aspects of the service and providing the visitors with links for all the relevant portals, applications, services and news around the EWC.


Hope you like it!

Start [UTC]: 10/09/2024 08:00
End [UTC]: 10/09/2024 09:00

The European Weather Cloud (EWC) teams at ECMWF and EUMETSAT are pleased to invite you to the fourth thematic EWC webinar of 2024.

It will happen on Tuesday 10 September 2024 from 08:00 to 09:00 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 capabilites of the EWC.

While the first two webinars in 2023 focused on the basics to get you started (you can find more information, including the video recordings, here and here), in this series we explore various aspects of cloud utilisation through examples, with a specific emphasis on key functionalities and cloud skills. The previous EWC webinars and their recordings can be found here.

In this upcoming webinar, we will focus on the tenancy administration, from describing the role and responsibilities of the tenant administrator and covering different aspects that include the tenancy users management, permissions to access functionalities and blueprints, security, communications and accounting of the cloud resources consumption.

By the end of this 1-hour session, participants will have gained a better understanding of how to manage and administer an EWC tenancy, as well as the duties and responsibilities of the tenant administrator role. 

Attendance

Please note that the main target audience of this webinar is existing and prospective tenancy administrators as well as Member and Co-operating States' Computing Representatives. However, the webinar remains open to anyone interested from an ECMWF or EUMETSAT Member and Co-operating States. 

If you would like to attend the webinar, please complete the registration: https://events.ecmwf.int/event/424/registrations/280/ 

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.

Dear all,

EUMETSAT side of the EWC announced a maintenance on 15 July 2024 11:00 - 11:30 CEST to improve network performance.

During the maintenance, short disruption in resource management using Morpheus may be expected. Moreover, connections to the Data Store and EUMETView may suffer from short interruptions and may require a restart. For other workloads there should not be any interruptions.
In case of any questions or comments or issues, please contact us via support (https://jira.ecmwf.int/servicedesk/customer/portal/9/) or via Rocket.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Dear all,

EUMETSAT is improving the security of the default setup and harmonise the service with ECMWF by enforcing SSH key-based authentication for all new VMs. SSH key authentication provides a more secure alternative to password-based authentication.

From now on, all new VMs configured will only be authenticated with SSH keys for security.

 

Why Use SSH Key Authentication?

 Increased Security: SSH keys are much longer and more complex than passwords, making them harder to crack.

 No Password Management: With SSH keys, there are no passwords to remember or rotate, reducing administrative overhead.

 

How to create and use SSH keys?

For detailed instructions on setting up SSH key authentication for new VMs, please refer to this documentation: https://confluence.ecmwf.int/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=430705715.

 

How to improve the security of the existing VMs?

We want to remind that EWC tenants are responsible on the all VMs in the EWC and *we strongly recommend to change to SSH keys*. To retrospectively enforce the use of SSH-keys to existing VMs, please follow these steps:

• Navigate to the Morpheus dashboard and log in with your credentials.

• Go to Instances from the main menu.

• Choose the instance.

• Click on Actions and then select Run workflow.

• Choose the Enforce SSH Key Authentication workflow.

• Follow the prompts to complete the workflow.

 

If you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to reach out to us.

We appreciate your understanding and cooperation as we work towards a more secure server environment.


Thank you,

EWC Team

ECMWF will upgrade the version of the CCI1 backend powering part of the European Weather Cloud service at ECMWF between Monday 8 to Friday 12 July 2024, following the successful upgrade of the CCI2 Openstack backend.

Does it affect me?

EWC tenancies at ECMWF may live on either CCI1 or CCI2 backends. Those tenancies based on the CCI2 backend will not be affected by this update.  

In Morpheus, you can see what backend is used in the name of the "cloud". Only resources in cloud named "ecmwf-cci1-..." may be affected.

What is the impact?

The upgrade should be transparent for most workloads on CCI1, as it will be done gradually across the infrastructure over three days to minimise disruption. 

All going well, existing standard instances should not suffer any downtime. GPU-powered instances, however, will unfortunately need to be rebooted during the update.

Short interruptions to the APIs are expected, which means you may not be able to provision new instances during brief periods of time throughout the upgrade process.

You may check https://status.ecmwf.int for all updates on the service status.


Make sure your instances are up to date!

An Important Security Vulnerability RegreSSHion has been discovered. Remember to check your instances and make sure they are up-to-date with all the security patches to keep them secure.