Case Study: NASA achieves centralized, scalable search of its Image and Video Library with Amazon CloudSearch

NASA - Customer Case Study

NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, needed to unify access to its Image and Video Library—more than 140,000 images, audio files, and videos that had been scattered across roughly 60 collections at 10 field centers—because inconsistent metadata and distributed storage made search and discovery difficult. To rebuild a scalable, cloud-native repository with robust search, NASA and its partner InfoZen used Amazon Web Services and specifically Amazon CloudSearch to provide free-text and fielded search capabilities.

InfoZen implemented a cloud-native, CI/CD-driven Image and Video Library (launched March 2017) using AWS services such as Amazon S3, EC2, RDS, DynamoDB, Elastic Transcoder and Amazon CloudSearch for search; they standardized metadata, centralized assets, and delivered an accessible, device-optimized interface. The result: 140,000+ assets are now easily discoverable from a single site (consolidating ~60 collections across 10 centers), the system scales on demand for peak events, meets Section 508 accessibility, and lowers infrastructure costs by eliminating on-premises hardware—measurable gains in discoverability, scalability, and cost efficiency enabled by Amazon CloudSearch.

NASA

Bryan Walls

Imagery Experts Deputy Program Manager