Case Study: European Space Agency achieves rapid, scalable delivery of Earth‑observation data to 50,000+ users with Amazon Web Services

European Space Agency - Customer Case Study

The European Space Agency’s Data User Elements (DUE) program at the Centre for Earth Observation in Frascati collects and distributes satellite-derived Earth observation data to scientists, governments, and private organizations for environmental monitoring, weather forecasting, and disaster relief. DUE needed a cost-effective, quickly deployable, and scalable infrastructure to store and deliver large volumes of imagery and products to a global user base while avoiding long hardware procurement cycles.

DUE built core storage and compute on AWS—using Amazon S3 (managed via an s3fs-based tool) for data hosting and Amazon EC2 to run log and usage analytics (AWStat)—to take advantage of pay-as-you-go pricing, rapid deployment, and easy scalability that the team can manage in-house. As a result, the program serves more than 50,000 users at peak, delivering up to about 30 TB of data at a time, and reports faster implementation, reliable performance, and continued expansion with AWS.

European Space Agency

Jose Ramos

Computer Systems Engineer