Shutting down NFS access to EODATA on 31st of August 2023 on WEkEO Elasticity

On 31st of August 2023, we are shutting down NFS access to the EODATA repository. After that date, you will only be able to access it via the S3 protocol.

The S3 protocol, as a cloud native solution, has been the preferred and intensively utilized EODATA access interface since the platform existed. NFS, on the other hand, was used to a smaller degree, mainly for support of older applications, which required direct access to a mounted file system. With the development of WEkEO Elasticity, the S3 interface has been constantly improved. Because of that, the bandwidth of single sessions increased from about 30 MB/s to more than 100 MB/s. What’s more, the S3 protocol allows users to download data in multiple sessions simultaneously. Thanks to that, the bandwidth for applications utilizing distributed architecture is scaling practically linearly.

Nowadays, we run into increasing challenges and requirements for accessing satellite data. Among others, they involve analytics, authorization, accountability etc. Even though the NFS protocol is widely used in enterprise environments (as a shared network storage), it has many limitations in Service Provider deployments for sharing satellite data. The authorization and accountability which NFS provides are insufficient.

That is why we have decided to further intensify works on development of the S3 access interface and to drop NFS support for accessing EODATA.

Virtual machines created using default images listed below have NFS EODATA access enabled by default.

  • Windows images on WAW3-1 cloud published before 20th of December 2022

Virtual machines created using default images listed below have EODATA access enabled by S3 by default. If you did not change the default method of accessing EODATA on them, no further action should be required.

  • Windows images on WAW3-1 cloud published on or after 20th of December 2022

  • Linux images on WAW3-1 clouds

Remote Transfer for EODATA has never been available via NFS and is therefore unaffected by this change.

If you manually configured your VM to access the EODATA repository via NFS, you will of course need to switch to S3.

Methods of accessing EODATA via NFS not listed here are also affected by this change.

If you are currently using the EODATA repository via NFS on any of your VMs, the following articles might provide you with the information about switching to S3:

More useful articles can be found in the documentation.

Should you have any questions regarding the planned NFS shutdown, please do not hesitate to contact Customer Support.

We apologize for any inconvenience this change may cause.

Best Regards,

WEkEO Elasticity Team