A Cloud-Based Infrastructure for EO-Driven Climate Resilience Services

CLIMRES (LEADERSHIP FOR CLIMATE RESILIENT BUILDINGS) is a European project addressing the growing vulnerability of buildings and urban environments to climate change impacts. The project combines climate data, Earth Observation (EO) products, and impact assessment methodologies to identify climate-driven hazards, assess building and urban-scale vulnerabilities, and support decision-making through dedicated tools and measures. These solutions are validated through large-scale pilot demonstrations across several European countries. 

A key enabling outcome of CLIMRES is the design and deployment of a scalable, cloud-native infrastructure hosting the project’s Federated Data Exchange Platform (FDXP) and digital services. The infrastructure is hosted by ECMWF on a dedicated Kubernetes cluster within the Common Cloud Infrastructure (CCI), part of the European Weather Cloud co-managed by ECMWF and EUMETSAT. The underlying cloud environment is based on OpenStack with Ceph storage, providing elastic compute and scalable object storage capabilities for data-intensive workloads. This infrastructure provides the technical backbone for integrating heterogeneous datasets, executing data-processing workflows, and delivering operational services that underpin climate resilience assessments and decision-support applications. 

The CLIMRES platform follows cloud-native design principles and adopts containerization and microservice-based architectures to ensure modularity, scalability, and operational robustness. Kubernetes is used as the core orchestration layer, while Rancher provides centralized cluster management, monitoring, and operational visibility. All services, including the FDXP and supporting applications, are deployed consistently across environments using GitOps principles, ensuring reproducibility, traceability, and elimination of configuration drift. 

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines automate the full software lifecycle, from source code changes to container image building and deployment. Docker images are built through automated pipelines and deployed via Git-driven workflows, enabling transparent, auditable, and predictable releases. Semantic versioning and changelog generation are fully automated, ensuring consistent release management across services. 

This contribution presents the CLIMRES cloud infrastructure as a production-ready case study for EO- and climate-driven applications. It demonstrates how cloud-native technologies can effectively support scalable data management platforms and operational services for climate resilience.