How cloud is driving space exploration: an interview with European Space Agency CIO Filippo Angelucci

The Rosetta Space Programme was planned over email, but future missions will be powered by cloud, Filippo Angelucci tells Danny Palmer

Best known for the Rosetta Space Programme and the Philae lander that touched down on a comet over 300 million miles away, the European Space Agency (ESA) has to juggle a host of highly complex projects at any one time.

These focus on everything from space flight and engineering to scientific research, involving personnel from 20 EU member states working in facilities around the globe.

As a result, the IT department holding it all together has a lot to deliver, as Filippo Angelucci, ESA CIO, explains.

"Our role isn't only to develop satellites, but to operate them, to develop launcher systems, to support scientists, and so on.

"We have very wide responsibilities in the areas of space activities and this makes our job, at least as a supporting function to the whole agency, pretty complicated," he tells Computing.

ESA comprises a number of interconnected operations, says Angelucci.

"Science works with the scientists, launchers works with the industry, observation works with ground stations. So the interfaces we have are multiple and the way they're operated and funded makes our life as support to everyone pretty complex," he says.

In truth, the word "support" does not do the department's role justice.

"IT for the ESA isn't really only support anymore, it's actually everywhere, it's before, during and after all the missions that we do. We have a lot of IT," he says.

Despite the huge pressures on the department, it only numbers around 60 people who between them shoulder a range of responsibilities.

"We are directly responsible for the provision of corporate services in terms of infrastructure applications, ERP, HR systems and so on," Angelucci says.

With so much to do, ESA is increasingly turning to cloud computing to support some services. This is partially driven by the fact the organisation is more than 50 years old and is currently having to upgrade a lot of its technology.

Recently, ESA signed a deal with Orange Business Services to provide private cloud capabilities.

"Orange, for us, represented the possibility of acquiring capacity and knowledge that otherwise we wouldn't have been able to have," Angelucci explains.

"We're a limited team. We concentrate on putting together the capabilities where they exist, but we can't be knowledgeable about all of the technological areas which we have to work on. Orange was able to mobilise knowledge across all of their sites around the world in those areas we needed support," he says.

"From my perspective as CIO I've appreciated the fact that when we've needed the right resources, Orange will bring them in," he adds.

However, Orange isn't the only cloud provider ESA uses. The agency has also deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux in some parts of the organisation.

"We're technologically agnostic in the way that we don't have only one need in the variety of environments we need to support," he says. "We will not go with only one technology or one implementation if we think that'll bring constraints to our operations. One cloud doesn't preclude other ones."

Angelucci says cloud has enabled ESA to streamline operations and reduce costs.

"We've had to renew our hardware infrastructure for corporate applications and the cloud allowed us to do that in a way we couldn't otherwise have afforded," he says. "There are economic benefits based on the fact that cloud allows you to use resources as needed. Then, when you don't, you stop paying for them."

Cloud flexibility

Angelucci says ESA has benefited from the flexibility that comes from using cloud over on-premise systems.

"If you think of support activities in which you want to simulate certain environments, validate new tools and so on, those are activities that might require a lot of computing power and resources - but then one day the project is finished and abandoned," he says.

"With a traditional approach you'd have had to buy a lot of hardware and keep it as an investment," he says. "Cloud allows engineers and scientists to operate more efficiently. The fact they have computing power when they need it right away, they just configure it right away, is something they couldn't have had before."

Cloud computing was not available when ESA engineers were designing and building the Rosetta space probe and Philae lander, which were launched in 2003 after a decade of development.

"Rosetta has been under development for 20 years, so you can imagine in the time it was designed the cloud didn't exist. Collaboration was via email," Angelucci explains.

Communications technology has advanced significantly since then and played a major role in the recent comet landing, which became a global media event.

"Rosetta represented a big jump because it had a high visibility and had a huge impact on the general public, and the IT innovations were more in the communications side as opposed to the mission itself," Angelucci says.

The Rosetta programme and countless other scientific research projects conducted by ESA produce terabytes of data a day for scientists and volunteers to analyse. That's causing Angelucci to rethink the way in which the organisation deals with data storage and access.

"What can we do with this data? How can we best allow people to use it?" The answer to these questions, Angelucci believes, could be "data-as-a-service".

"What we're thinking of is setting up some kind of environment which allows data to become a service, really talking about data and knowledge as a service," he says.

"This is where we think there will be the big changes in terms of where we operate. Because we will concentrate more on data and allowing it to be correlated with data from other sources," he adds.

A data revolution

The way ESA staff access data is also changing, with advances in mobile technology having a growing impact on the way they work.

"People have more direct access to our databases and information for applications they can use on their mobiles," says Angelucci.

"In the past our data was used by specialists, but now its available to a wider community and that's making us think in different ways. We're trying to focus more on the exploitation of the information and making it more available to devices around the world."

Collaborative technology is helping to support this drive to improve the global dissemination of data.

"The connectivity across the sites is via gigabit networks and on those we provide video conferencing across establishments in high definition. This is combined with desktop video conferencing systems as well," Angelucci says.

"We also use collaboration platforms like SharePoint and we recently launched a social network capability called ESA Connect."

Looking to the future, Angelucci says virtualisation and SaaS are likely to play an important role at ESA as it outsources business operations.

"The way I see it, suppliers will take over many of those roles that were previously performed by the IT department, which will then work more on brokering the services across the various silos," Angelucci says.

"It'll make us focus more on controlling as opposed to implementing, that's one of the biggest trends," he adds.