Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) provides weather forecasts for a variety of users, including aviation, agriculture, media and the general public. FMI spends significant resources to prepare meteorological data and products to suit our specific needs, dictacted by our geography and culture. Our data-oriented production system forces us to constantly develop novel methods to keep up with the increasing data volume of NWP. Like many other organisations FMI started to move towards cloud computing in the first half of 2010s, a process which is still continuing today. Cloud computing has given us new tools to handle the increasing data volume.
While we initially started with a “virtual machines in the Cloud” approach, a more holistic adaption to modern, cloud-native technologies such as S3, Kubernetes and AWS Lambda has enabled us to expand our operations efficiently and flexibly. While we are not a cloud-first organization, our on-premise computing infrastructure has also been upgraded to match the common cloud technologies. This streamlines the operating environment as same software stacks can be used on-prem and in the cloud. Using containers is increasingly important as it makes easier to move code between systems. Containers offer natural isolation from operating system upgrades, which is important when pace of development is high and software depends on specific library versions.
A big challenge still facing us is the support of software that is not easily translated to cloud workflows. In the meteorological domain this is rather common as software has long lifetime and code refactoring is in many cases not feasible. We must also ensure that our users and developers maintain their skills and knowledge as new technologies come and go.
