EWC Service Definition

The European Weather Cloud (EWC) connects the cloud environments of ECMWF and EUMETSAT into a larger entity, providing unified access to online data, functions, and services from both organisations. The key feature of 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 carrying official duties), as well as a number of identified purposes in support of EUMETSAT and ECMWF's mission (e.g. usage by the EUMETSAT Satellite Application Facilities, or in the context of specific annual R&D calls or ECMWF EMI R&D projects).

The service consists of cloud resources provided by EUMETSAT and ECMWF and controlled by a cloud management 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 resources and application environments to both cloud infrastructures (EUMETSAT and ECMWF) regardless of the home location of their tenancy.

Users deploy their own applications and are responsible for the maintenance and the application environment 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

Accounting Service

The European Weather Cloud Accounting and Metering Service (hereafter referred as EWC 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.

Cloud Management

Cloud management is based on OpenStack (see Open Source Cloud Computing Infrastructure - OpenStack for general information).

All resources can be deployed via cloud management UI and via CLI / Rest API. The offered features may evolve along with Cloud Management service offering development.

• Tenant Provisioning: EWC allows the provisioning of a set of resources to a tenant administrator (in the remaining referred only as tenant).
• Virtual Machines: Tenants can 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 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.

Community Hub

EWC Community Hub is a central platform where users can discover, evaluate and deploy reusable open‑source Items—ranging from IaC, blueprints, containerised applications, algorithms, datasets and documentation—supported by a searchable Dashboard and dedicated tooling, all designed to boost collaboration, reduce duplicated effort and accelerate cloud‑native work across the European Weather Cloud.

Container Registry (Pilot, no SLA guaranteed)

EWC Container Registry, built on Harbor, provides all tenancies with a secure, policy‑driven and vulnerability‑scanned artifact registry that supports RBAC, image signing and cloud‑native interoperability for platforms such as Kubernetes, ensuring consistent and trusted container management across the European Weather Cloud.

DNS

EWC DNS assigns each VM a DNS record in the form \<machine-name>.\<tenancy-name>.\<hosting-location>.ewcloud.host, created automatically after provisioning, using lowercase machine names without spaces or dots, resolving to the public IP when present, and following the hosting‑location codes f (ECMWF) and s (EUMETSAT).

Discussion Platform (Pilot, no SLA guaranteed)

EWC provides a Rocket.Chat service to support collaboration and software development across the European Weather Cloud, where eligible users from Member and Co‑operating State Meteorological Services, as well as approved academic and research institutions - can self‑register directly through the registration page: EWC Discussion Platform.

Managed K8s (Pilot, no SLA guaranteed)

EWC Managed Kubernetes Service enables each tenancy to deploy and operate its own Kubernetes clusters within the European Weather Cloud, providing a core, cloud‑native platform for running containerised workloads across the EWC environment.

Secret management (Pilot, no SLA guaranteed)

EWC Secret Manager, built on OpenBao, provides a centralised and secure service for storing, accessing and rotating secrets across all EWC tenancies, supporting cloud‑native workloads such as Kubernetes (via the External Secrets Operator), automation pipelines and Community Hub integrations.

Expected service level

The following service level is expected:

Acronyms and definitions