Case Study: Airbus Defence and Space achieves real-time, scalable access to petabytes of satellite imagery with Google Cloud Platform

Airbus Charting new territory with Google Cloud Platform

Airbus Defence and Space’s Intelligence unit, a leading provider of satellite-derived imagery and analytics to more than 1,200 customers in 100+ countries, needed to modernize its delivery model to keep pace with a growing fleet of sensors and rising customer expectations. The legacy workflow meant customers waited hours or days for images; Airbus wanted real-time, scalable access and more affordable options so smaller organizations could use its data.

Airbus built the OneAtlas platform on Google Cloud Platform—leveraging Cloud Storage, Google Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Datastore and TensorFlow—to stream and process imagery at scale. The result: customers can stream images in under half a second (vs. hours before), cloud-based storage and autoscaling support massive growth (currently adding terabytes of imagery yearly with plans to reach petabyte scale), cloud-detected cloud-cover error fell from 11% to 3%, and new pricing/streaming options have opened the market to many more users.

Airbus Defence and Space

Jean-Michel Darroy

VP Head of Services Growth