Modified on 9 Feb 2024: Updated new time and refined the impact a bit
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The infrastructure provider of the EUMETSAT side of the EWC announced an upcoming scheduled maintenance window that will be taking place on 21 February 2024 between 09:00 and 17:00 CET.
During the maintenance works, there may be temporary (up to several hours) interruptions of certain components, which may result in:
- inability to manage cloud resources (e.g., deploy new VMs or remove / re-configure old ones),
- disruptions in virtual network (e.g., inability to access the VMs from the internet, broken communication among VMs through internal networks, broken access from VMs to the storage),
While there is a possibility for longer interruption, in the nominal case the impact will affect only from seconds to a few minutes.
In case of any questions or comments, please contact us via support.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your patience and understanding.
Dear ,
Happy new year!
Today 04.01.2024 we plan to update EWC Rocketchat starting from 15:30 AM CET. The process should take around 1h.
During the maintenance period, rocketchat could be not accessible or not available.
This maintenance is aiming to improve the performance of rocketchat, bring new features and security updates. We are doing it on short notice to catchup with updates over the Christmas period and to have the platform up to date before most of the users are back to EWC.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
EWC team
Dear EWC users!
HTC batch processing service is now available on EUM side of EWC. It is currently in beta testing. This service is available as best effort for testing. Be aware when trying this service.
You can find the description of the service here: EUMETSAT - HTC batch processing
It's based on HTCondor. Users can deploy execute nodes and submit nodes in their tenancies and join a common pool of resources. There is a simple example to start with, to customize your processing scripts. All workloads run as containers. The example also show how to create a container that you can submit to HTCondor.
Kind regards,
EWC Team
Dear all,
Tomorrow 07.11.2023 we plan to update EWC Rocketchat starting from 10:00 AM CET. The process should take around 1h.
During the maintenance period, rocketchat could be not accessible or not available.
This maintenance is aiming to improve the performance of rocketchat, bring new features and security updates.
We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
EWC team
The European Weather Cloud (EWC) teams at ECMWF and EUMETSAT are pleased to invite you to two upcoming EWC introductory webinars in November.
These webinars are aimed at new or prospective users of the EWC service, which is available to ECMWF and EUMETSAT Member and Co-operating States. Focusing on the basics to get you started, these webinars will show you around our cloud portal Morpheus, which should give you a taste of the features available and how to carry out the main operations, including deployment of instances, using the object store, and simple automation.
The two introductory webinars will be similar in content but each of them will focus on a particular side of the EWC - either ECMWF or EUMETSAT - and cover information specific to each host.
If that sounds interesting to you, you may register to one of the two 1-hour webinars based on your focus:
- ECMWF focused - Tuesday 21 November 2023 09:00 - 10:00 UTC
- EUMETSAT focused - Tuesday 28 November 2023 09:00 - 10:00 UTC
You will find the registration form in the left-hand side menu of the pages above. We will alert you of your acceptance to the webinar and send you all the joining information and Microsoft Teams meeting details in due course.
Please note that these webinars are open to anyone from an ECMWF or EUMETSAT Member and Co-operating State, and will be conducted in English.
We are having issues at the EUMETSAT side of the EWC. The issues may effect both cloud management functions (deploying and removing VMs and other resources) and existing workloads. We are working on the problem.
To fully understand the issue and its severity, we kindly ask you to inform us by replying to this message or via support@europeanweather.cloud in case you experience any problems.
We apologize for the inconvenience!
We are pleased to announce a significant enhancement to the security and reliability of our LDAP administration, primarily on the EUMETSAT side of the EWC.
In response to intermittent LDAP issues that were causing disruptions, we have successfully resolved the underlying challenges. These issues were primarily related to the admin account getting locked out due to too many failed login attempts, often stemming from brute force attempts.
Our solution involves several key steps:
Introducing ipaadmin_username in Cypher: To mitigate these issues, we have introduced a new parameter, 'ipaadmin_username,' in Cypher (Morpheus → Tools → Cypher). This parameter allows us to employ a unique and less guessable name for the LDAP admin user, making brute force attempts less likely to impact this user ID.
Workflow Updates: We've updated all workflows to use the ipaadmin_username variable instead of the "admin" username, ensuring a seamless transition.
Tenancy-Specific Implementation: For our existing tenancies, we have introduced a new admin user with the new, unique name and ensured it is reflected in their Cypher configurations. It's important to note that the 'admin' user will be disabled soon. We encourage all tenants to use this new custom LDAP admin user for all admin related LDAP activities.
Action Required: We kindly request that all users and tenants promptly adopt this change, as the 'admin' user will be disabled. The new custom LDAP admin user now serves as the primary LDAP user for all admin related operations.
Potential Outcome of Not Adopting the Change: Failing to embrace this change may result in LDAP failures that are challenging to troubleshoot, particularly for larger tenancies.
We appreciate your cooperation in making this transition. If you have any questions or need assistance with this change, please feel free to reach out to our support team.
Thank you for your understanding and continued commitment to maintaining the security and stability of our systems.
The Accounting Portal for the European Weather Cloud at https://accounting.europeanweather.cloud is now available for Computing Representatives for ECMWF and EUMETSAT Member and Cooperating States, as well as Tenant Administrators. If you are one of those, you should have received or will receive shortly all the information on how to access and your credentials.
This portal will help you monitor the usage of computing and storage resources by your tenant or tenants. Two dashboards are available:
1) Computing Representative dashboard, providing overview of the annual budget and consumption
2) Tenant dashboard, providing more detailed information on the usage.
Both dashboards are available for all users, while the Computing Representatives can see all tenancies within their Member State and Tenant Admins can only see their own tenancies.
You will find more information about this service in the Accounting article in our Knowledge Base.
We are glad to announce the European Weather Cloud service has become operational as of 26 September 2023. The service is now run on fully operational cloud backend services at both ECMWF and EUMETSAT, and can now be used for production-grade, operational workloads.
We are therefore closing a successful pilot phase, where more than 60 different use cases and projects from many countries and organisations have been able to get onboard a preliminary version of the service on both ECMWF and EUMETSAT clouds, and have provided the invaluable feedback that has led us to this day. Most of those tenancies have seamlessly transitioned into the operational phase and will continue to benefit from the service and its resources.
If you are using or plan to use the European Weather Cloud, have a look at our updated Terms and Conditions for the Use of European Weather Cloud Operational Service, as well as EWC service definition to know more about what's on offer.
The service is open for authorised users coming from the European Meteorological Infrastructure, including ECMWF and EUMETSAT, their Member and Cooperating States as well as EUMETNET. Do reach us via the European Weather Cloud Support Portal or get in touch with the corresponding Computing Representative in your Member or Cooperating State. Alternatively, you can also consider applying via ECMWF Special Projects or EUMETSAT R&D calls.
To mark this very important milestone, here are some links on the topic you may also find interesting:
https://www.ecmwf.int/en/about/media-centre/news/2023/european-weather-cloud-operational
https://www.eumetsat.int/eumetsat-and-ecmwf-launch-european-weather-cloud
https://stories.ecmwf.int/the-european-weather-cloud/index.html
We are updating our EUMETSAT EWC Morpheus on Wednesday 13 September 15-17 CEST. During the update window, the Morpheus user interface and APIs will not be available. The update does notaffect existing workloads.
This is an announcement for users of the EUMETCast Terrestrial service on the EWC. The EUMETCast Terrestrial service is undergoing a reorganisation on Monday September 11th in order to optimise bandwidth usage. Therefore, from Monday all users can have available a new TER-3 terrestrial service on their Reception station. Data disseminated on this instance is available exclusively on EUMETCast Terrestrial.
Full information on the reorganisation can be found on the official EUMETCast Terrestrial wiki page: https://eumetsatspace.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DSEC/pages/1989640193/EUMETCast+Terrestrial+Re-organisation
In addition, the EWC confluence page has been updated to provide information on adding the TER-3 instance for users that have a EUMETCast Terrestrial VM deployed in EWC: https://confluence.ecmwf.int/display/EWCLOUDKB/How+to+add+an+additional+service
For new users setting up a station on EWC, the EUMETCast Terrestrial over AMT VM available on Morpheus has been updated.
We remain available to offer you all the needed support.
As announced in previous communications, we have enabled the access to the new cloud infrastructure at ECMWF Bologna providing the European Weather Cloud service, which will replace the pilot infrastructure you may have been using up to now.
We would like to remind and invite you to review your currently deployed resources on the pilot infrastructure and start the migration to the new cloud. Since no virtual infrastructure, applications or data will be moved automatically, we strongly encourage you to check Migration of the European Weather Cloud at ECMWF to learn what changed, what is already available and what steps you need to take to ensure a smooth transition.
You are invited to start deploying your applications in the new cloud, as well as copying over any data you wish to keep using.
If you have any virtual machines or infrastructure that would not be easily recreated and you would need assistance to perform the migration of your cloud resources, please do get in contact with us through the European Weather Cloud Support Portal by the 15th of September.
We would aim to address the main migrations activities by the end of September.
We remain available to offer you all the needed support and assistance you might require and we would like to thank you in advance for your collaboration.
We are pleased to announce the registration for the new edition of the European Weather Cloud User Workshop is open. 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.
You may find the agenda and additional details here.
The workshop is organised jointly by ECMWF and EUMETSAT and is open to their Member and Co-operating States. If you meet the attendance criteria and would like to participate, we would kindly ask you to complete the registration form before 19 September.
We would also like to take this opportunity to ask you for a few minutes of your time to help us to shape the training offering for the European Weather Cloud by participating to the following survey:
https://ec.europa.eu/eusurvey/runner/ewc_training_survey
We look forward to seeing you at the European Weather Cloud User Workshop!
If you are using the European Weather Cloud at ECMWF, you may have noticed a new cloud choice in your tenancy. We have enabled the access to the new cloud infrastructure at ECMWF Bologna providing the European Weather Cloud service, which will replace the pilot one you may have been using up to now.
We would like to invite you to jump onboard and take some time to start exploring the new computing and storage service, and review your migration journey. Since no virtual infrastructure, applications or data will be moved automatically, we strongly encourage you to check Migration of the European Weather Cloud at ECMWF to learn what changed, what is already available and what steps you need to take to ensure a smooth transition.
We will continue to work on the system to make available the remaining missing features. In the meantime, you are welcome to start testing your applications in the new cloud throughout the summer, as well as copying over any data you wish to keep using on the new cloud. And if you are working on something new, we would recommend you start on the new cloud straightaway.
As always, if you have any concerns or you would like to discuss your options for the migration, please do get in touch with us through the European Weather Cloud Support Portal.
After several years in pilot mode, we are glad to announce the upcoming availability of ECMWF's operational infrastructure for this service during June 2023. Hosted in ECMWF's new Data Centre in Bologna, the system setup is being finalised and work is ongoing to welcome the first users shortly.
All the workloads currently running in the pilot infrastructure in Reading, UK, will need to be migrated to their new home in Bologna. As a user of the existing pilot European Weather Cloud at ECMWF, and in order to ensure a swift transition, we are kindly asking you to consider the following preparatory actions before then:
- Perform some housekeeping on your tenant, deleting any infrastructure and data such as any Virtual Machine and S3 buckets that you don't require to keep.
- Assess what parts of your deployments can be easily recreated from scratch on the new cloud.
- Let us know if you have any virtual machines or infrastructure that would not be easily recreated so we can discuss the next steps with you. No virtual infrastructure, applications or data will be moved automatically.
Once the new system is ready for you to get on board, we will get in touch to outline the next steps you will need to follow to start the migration, which may include:
- Redeploying those parts of your virtual infrastructure and applications that have not been moved.
- Copying over any data present in S3 buckets or Virtual Machines that you wish to keep to their equivalent location in the new cloud.
In the meantime, our Morpheus portal will be moving to its new home on Wednesday 7 June. While your instances and applications will be unaffected, the portal will be unavailable to provision or manage your tenancy between 14:00 and 16:00 UTC. After the session, you will still be able to access and manage your existing cloud resources in the same way as before. You can follow the status of the service in the ECMWF service status.
Let us know via the European Weather Cloud Support Portal if you have any question or concern regarding this migration, or if you wish to discuss your use case more in detail.