Introduction

Before you beginning the process of submitting your Item, make note of the following prerequisites:

Once you have taken care of these basic prerequisites, you can turn your attention to the Item itself. Whether your idea is in an early conceptualization state or fully implemented, take a moment to think about its purpose, the customization options that would improve reusability, the level of support you can offer, and the open-source license you wish to grant.

Choosing a License

Unless your Item has dependencies linked to GPL terms of use, or on the contrary, they are constrained by a proprietary license, you, as the Item owner, are free to choose a suitable open-source license under which to feature Items. For reference, EWC-supported Items typically release under MIT or Apache 2.0 license.

Deciding on a Support Level

If you wish to change the support level of Item currently featured on the dashboard, bump its semantic version up from MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH to MAJOR.MINOR+1.0 (e.g. 1.0.3 to 1.1.0), update the Item metadata to specify the new version and support level, and submit it for catalog update (see Submit your Item for details).

The Community Hub recognizes four different support levels, one of which is reserved for Items featured by the EWC and its close partners (e.g. EWC-Supported). You, as the Item owner, are free to choose, from any of the remaining support levels, the one that best fits your availability and commitment:

NameSummaryAudienceService Level Agreement (SLA)Example
Community-SharedBest-Effort / No SLAFor typical users or research groups sharing useful workNone. No guaranteed response, or issue acknowledgement. Contributions and fixes depend entirely on community goodwill.A GitHub repository with a permissive license but no maintainer commitment
Community-UpdatedActive / No SLAFor small teams or labs actively using the Item themselvesNone. Maintainers monitor issues and PRs. Best-effort responses. Updates are featured occasionally (aligned with their internal usage)An enriched dataset with pre-calculated metrics on atmospheric phenomena, updated at irregular interval and/or subject to data availability, without any formal commitment
Community-SupportedWell-defined SLAsFor organizations willing to stand behind their ItemsDocumented response channels (email, ticket system, GitHub issues). Defined response time (within hours or up to 7 business days). Regular security patches. Changelog publishing.A data pipeline template for various streaming analysis algorithms, regularly updated to support new datasets and increase throughput capabilities
EWC-SupportedWell-defined SLAs, Partner-BackedFor Items featured by EWC partners (ECMWF, EUMETSAT, etc.) or trusted collaboratorsSame as Community-Supported, plus guaranteed compatibility with the EWC hardware and clear escalation path in case of security sensitive issues.A one-click deployable software stack for self-managed identity/policy/audit (IPA), hardened SSH access point and remote desktop environment hosting

Defining Deployability

Wether an Item is deployable or not depends mainly on the Item Technology (find the full list of currently supported ones on the EWC Community Hub page).

Item is not Deployable

No additional action required.

Item is Deployable

If your Item is indeed deployable and you wish to feature it as such, please make sure to assess whether or not it works out-of-the-box in both of the EWC providers, namely:

In the event deployments are only intended to work on one of the sites, or requires additional setup on one of them, please clearly disclaim as part of the Item metadata you submit. An statement on the Item's description is sufficient.

(Optional) Adding Compatibility with the ewccli

Before attempting to feature your Item as compatible, please ensure you test and validate by carrying out a deployment via the ewccli. EWC reviewers may refuse your submission if it is unclear if deployment works.


If you are convinced featuring your Item as compatible can greatly improve its reception among community members, but you are unsure how to conduct the necessary deployment tests, you can place a support ticket to request assistance.


If you meet all the criteria listed below, you might want to consider the benefits of adding compatibility for the ewccli:

The ewccli is a Linux-native Python-based tool which allows you to interact with deployable Items directly into a EWC tenancy, with minimal setup required on your local working environment. See Deploying new instances and applying Ansible Playbooks on them with the ewccli.

On paper, adding compatibility with the ewclid does not require additional development effort on your side, as the business logic is built into the tool itself. From your side, all that is required is additional Item metadata to be prepared, namely:

  1. Item input specification: If any available. May also include default values for each input.
  2. Item output specification: If any available.
  3. Item annotations: Set as category: EWCCLI-compatible,Deployable

You can find references to the metadata schema in the Submit your Item page. For a complete Item Metadata example including full compatibility with the ewccli checkout this entry in the live catalog.

Following Implementation Best-Practices

Best-practices are not always well documented, and they tend to change. If you are not sure what is currently considered a best-practice, at least within the EWC community, we recommend you start here:

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