EWC Harmonisation activities status

Since we started this journey, and as we have evolved our EWC offering, certain aspects of the overall experience had started to slowly diverge on both sides of the EWC. Based on feedback received by our users, ECMWF and EUMETSAT EWC Teams have embarked in a process to harmonise the user experience from users, regardless of what side of the EWC they work on. 

We focused on identifying and analysing any differences in terms of infrastructure, setup, support and use cases and started to consolidate the approaches and offering wherever possible. As a result, you may have already noticed some work being done in several key areas:

Documentation

We have reviewed all our articles in our Knowledge base and made sure all the instructions applied to both cloud backends, wherever possible. Certain pages with similar instructions for both backends have been generalised, simplified or merged.

Outreach & Training

It is not something new, but we plan to continue to offer joint EWC Training and Tutorials, including webinars and events like the User Workshop.

Morpheus experience

While we keep both ECMWF and EUMETSAT Morpheus portals to access and manage your virtual infrastructure at EWC, some work is ongoing to bring the interaction with them as close as possible, converging in similar default setup and naming conventions for the same elements.

VM images

We now share a common set of base Virtual Machine images featuring Rocky Linux and Ubuntu across the EWC, and aim to jointly release any updates to them when needed.

EWC common community templates

A great deal of effort has been invested to ensure that common templates, instance types and workflows are consistent and can work on both sides.

Openstack API access

For those users wanting to automate their deployments and have finer control over their infrastructure, we have recently jointly announced the access to the cloud backends directly.  Beyond the unavoidable minor differences from the different cloud providers, the process and experience when using this approach should be symmetric from the user point of view.

Looking ahead, the evolution of EWC underlying cloud infrastructure in the next years will continue to take into account all these harmonisation aspects in order to continue to offer users a consistent view and experience across the EWC. Behind the scenes, a major effort is underway towards the development of the new services coming up from the features roadmap, where we hope we can continue to deliver value for this community.