Cloud Native Geospatial Outreach Day Recap
By: Chris Holmes
Tags: Cloud Native, Geospatial, Remote Sensing, Cog, Stac Spec

I wanted to give a recap of the event and share some of my favorite parts.

Welcome & Overview

Thanks again to our sponsors!

We opened with a welcome from Bruno Sánchez-Andrade Nuño and me, representing the Microsoft and Planet, the convening sponsors. Then Hamed, the new Executive Director of Radiant Earth, introduced the Data Labeling Contest (which was a great success). I then attempted to give an overview of ‘Cloud Native Geospatial’, to help explain it to new people and to chart our progress. It’s always fun to pull these together, as each time I get to survey all the new things happening, and there seems to always be great new stuff. This time I also tried to explain more of the ‘why’. I don’t think I made the strongest argument, but I hope to try again and go deeper in a blog post.

Lightning Talks

The two sessions of lightning talks truly demonstrated how the Cloud Native Geospatial movement is crystalizing in a big way. When I put out the call for lightning talks I knew there was some cool content out there, but I was blown away by the diversity and sheer awesomeness that came in. If you are to watch any of the recorded videos from outreach day then Lightning Talks Round 1 and Round 2 are definitely the place to start.

We heard how a number of different organization and datasets are embracing STAC & COG, from commercial satellite providers like Maxar and Planet to startups like Arturo, SparkGeo, and Astraea, to the huge public data catalogs of ESA in their FedEO Portal, NASA in their Common Metadata Repository and particular open data sets like CBERS and Sentinel 5P (those links all go direct to the lightning talks). And all three major public cloud providers are moving towards the formats — AWS shared all about their Registery of Open Data, Google showed how Earth Engine can read and write COG’s, their STAC interface to their Earth Engine Data Catalog, and their plans to embrace STAC more. And though Microsoft hasn’t embraced it quite as quickly they have the potential to be a real emerging force in providing Cloud Native Geospatial datasets, as part of their AI for Earth and Planetary Computer initiatives. Their Azure Open Datasets are already quite interesting, and they are building a team that looks set to really embrace COG and STAC as a differentiator. And I always love those who differentiate by being the best at open standards.

I was also really excited to see two international development organizations, the World Bank and Digital Earth Africa, join the movement. Both sponsored the event, but more importantly, both are seeing the potential of this new approach. Years ago I did a fellowship in Zambia, so it is now always in the back of my mind how the technology I build can work in less mature technological environments. Storing data as COG and STAC on the cloud takes much less ‘capacity building’ than previous geospatial approaches, cloud storage regions in Africa let the data live close to its users and moving the compute to the cloud obviates the need to download massive datasets on slow connections to do analysis. So it was awesome to learn about all the Digital Earth Africa from Fang Yuan — they’ve actually put up the first fully Cloud Native Geospatial Sentinel 2 dataset, converting the level 2 surface reflectance products from JPEG2000 to Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF and putting a STAC interface on top of it, stored in the Africa AWS region.