EWC EUMETSAT side has some issues with the infrastructure. We are investigating the problem. We will update this blog post when we know more. 

We have to run maintenance to the EUMETSAT side Morpheus at 14-15 CEST. Small interruption in Morpheus is expected but no running workloads are affected. We apologize for the inconvenience! 

Unfortunately, we have issues with VM deployment, and occasionally creating new VMs stops in the finalizing phase. Existing workloads are working nominally. 

We are working on the issue and apologize for the inconvenience!

We are pleased to announce a new edition of the European Weather Cloud User Workshop. The event will be completely virtual on 26 September 2023.

We will cover new aspects of the EWC and different ways to benefit from it as we enter the operational phase. We will also give the floor to current users with interesting use cases and discuss the plans for the future evolution of the EWC. We will combine presentations from ECMWF, EUMETSAT, and EWC Users, as well as interactive sessions for discussions, feedback, and exchange of ideas. If you would like to share your experiences and work in the EWC, get in touch with us via the European Weather Cloud Support Portal.

This workshop is organised jointly by ECMWF and EUMETSAT and is open to their Member and Co-operating States. Save the date in your calendar! We will get in touch with the registration details and full programme closer to the event date.

We look forward to seeing you at the European Weather Cloud User Workshop!

Unfortunately, the EUMETSAT side of the EWC is experiencing a service degradation. Users cannot deploy or delete new VMs or other resources, and workloads cannot access EUMETSAT data services. Apart from data services access, the running workloads and EUMETCast Terrestrial work nominally.

We are investigating the issue. 

To better assess the impacts, we would like to hear from you about any consequences the incident had on your use case. Please reach us via Rocket.chat or email. We are grateful for your feedback!

We apologize for the inconvenience!

Our provider announced a maintenance window on the EUMETSAT EWC cloud for a period of Thursday, 20 April 10:00 PM - Friday, 21 April 02:00 AM CET. The total unavailability in the timeframe should not exceed 1h. 

During the maintenance period, all cloud management functions (i.e. deploying virtual machines) and S3 access to private object storage (https://s3.waw3-1.cloudferro.com/) will be temporarily unavailable. Existing virtual machines are not affected.

This maintenance is aiming to improve the performance and increase the stability of the cloud.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Unfortunately, the EUMETSAT side of the EWC experienced a service degradation last night 11.-12.04. 22:40 - 5:00 CET. This incident affected both cloud management functions and running workloads. Our infrastructure provider is currently investigating the root cause of the issue.

All functions should be nominal now.

To better assess the impacts, we would like to hear from you about any consequences the incident had on your use case. Please reach us via discussion platform, support, or email. We are grateful for your feedback!

We apologize for the inconvenience!

Our provider informed us that they had an internal service malfunction which has caused some of the virtual machines' (VM) file systems to change to a read-only mode at EUMETSAT EWC. The problem has been resolved, but some VMs may still be in a read-only state. In that case, we kindly ask that you reboot the VM to restore normal functionality.

The incident happened during the previous weekend (4-5 March).

We have checked some of the workloads and not hitting the problem so far. In order to understand the full impacts of the outage, we would like you to inform us if you are impacted.

EUMETSAT EWC infrastructure provider is announcing a priority maintenance window which is scheduled for today, February 6 from 22:00 CET until February 7 to 03:00 CET . During this period, temporary problems with deploying or changing any resources are expected. The work will not cause any impact for already deployed resources. 

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your patience and understanding.

We are updating the direct link configuration between EUMETSAT EWC infrastructure and data holdings. Because of that, we expect short interruptions in connection from EUMETSAT EWC infrastructure to EUMETSAT Data Store and in managing resources (e.g. deploying/removing new VMs) during 31 Jan - 1 Feb. Everything else should work nominally.

We are pleased to invite you to our new pilot EWC discussion platform on https://chat.europeanweather.cloud using the rocket.chat team chat system.

The platform is set up to facilitate collaboration and software development via online discussion. On the platform, you can freely discuss with other EWC users and the EWC Team from ECMWF and EUMETSAT. The platform can be used with a web browser or by a client. 

Users with Member and Cooperating State meteorological service email addresses can self-register by going to https://chat.europeanweather.cloud and selecting Register a new account. If you do not have an email account with a white-listed domain but would like to register, please raise a ticket in our Support portal with information on which tenancy you are using. You can find more documentation at: https://confluence.ecmwf.int/display/EWCLOUDKB/Discussion+platform

For those with existing accounts on the EUMETSAT-only rocket chat used in the pilot phase, we encourage you to migrate as this service will likely be wound down in 2023.

We hope to see you there soon! 

We thank all presenters and participants for the successful workshop!

The presentations will be available to as links in the agenda.

Recording available at: http://s3.waw3-1.cloudferro.com/ewc-user-support-assets/2022-10-13-EWC-User-Workshop-recording.mp4 

Agenda / presentations

EUMETSAT has launched new annual research and development (R&D) calls to be conducted in European Weather Cloud (EWC).

Research and development (R&D) applications are open to researchers from any publically funded organisation in the EUMETSAT Member States. The applications should be submitted no later than 30 November 2022 for a project started in May 2023.

The resources granted are solely infrastructure and support in using it. The computing infrastructure is in EWC close to the EUMETSAT and ECMWF data holdings and includes virtual machines (VM), object storage, GPUs, and shared file system. The projects are expected to range from 50 to 100 vCPUs (cores), 400-800 GB of RAM, 50-100 TB of storage, and 4-8 vGPUs (1 vGPU = 1/8 of NVIDIA GPU RTX A6000) to run on EUMETSAT part of the EWC.

Please consult https://www.eumetsat.int/european-weather-cloud-research-development-call for more information and instructions to apply.

Note that EWC resources at ECMWF can also be applied as part of the ECMWF Special Projects.

We are pleased to announce a new edition of the European Weather Cloud User Workshop, jointly organised by ECMWF and EUMETSAT. The event will be completely virtual on 13 October 2022.

This workshop is open to Member and Co-operating States of EUMETSAT and ECMWF. If you meet the attendance criteria and would like to participate, we would kindly ask you to complete the registration form before 30 September.

As we are soon entering the operational phase, we will cover governance, access and operational aspects of usage. We will also give the floor to current pre-operational users with interesting use cases and discuss the plans for future evolution of the EWC. We will combine presentations from ECMWF, EUMETSAT, and Users, as well as interactive sessions for discussions, feedback, and exchange of ideas. The full programme will be made available closer to the event date.

We look forward to seeing you at the European Weather Cloud User Workshop!

Lately, the critical Apache Log4j vulnerability CVE-2021-44228 in the Apache Log4j library has been announced. (Please consult e.g. https://logging.apache.org/log4j/2.x/security.html for further information.)

We have checked our infrastructure components both manually and with a help of repository scanning tools. We are not aware of any EWC infrastructure component to be exposed.

However, we have not checked or scanned any workloads inside tenancies. Instead, we want to emphasize that tenants are responsible for their workloads, and each EWC tenant needs to check and update their services. You are advised to check your workload. You should be especially careful if you use any java-based web services such as GeoServer.