When the Space Gets Cloudy A Systematic Assessment of Cloud Computing Application Domains for ESA Ground Data Systems

The European Space Agency has conducted in 2011 a research and development study at the European Space Agency, ESA, to analyse how Cloud Computing paradigm can best be utilised to address some of the challenges of modern ground data systems, such as increased distribution, increased demand on computing resources, increasing effort required for maintenance and deployment of an ever growing number of operational software and infrastructure baselines, increased demand on software flexibility in terms of fast adoption of evolving operational requirements, increased complexity of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) management, increased expectation on reduced time-to-the-market along with continuous emphasis on reducing the development, maintenance and operation costs of ground data systems. The objectives of the study have been: Identification of candidate ground data systems for each Cloud Computing service-provisioning model. For this purpose an analytic tool has been developed which utilises a set of metrics for systematic evaluation of the so-called “cloudability ” level of the analysed applications; Assessment of suitability of different Cloud deployment models, i.e. private clouds, public clouds or hybrid clouds for each identified application domain; Analysis of how and to what extent th