Smartest comment so far in the thread. The issue of cloud egress has been known and worked at NASA for a decade now, and the article treats it like an OMG mome

Smartest comment so far in the thread. The issue of cloud egress has been known and worked at NASA for a decade now, and the article treats it like an OMG moment. Historically, data have been stored and processed on-premise but NASA has been migrating data and processing to the cloud where it makes sense. For instance, it makes a lot of sense to burst out to the cloud for near-real-time processing during and just after natural disasters like earthquakes and forest fires. The large missions they mention (SWOT, NISAR - big radars in Earth orbit) are drivers of the shift of more processing + data to the cloud, because they will generate an unprecedented amount of data. They are pathfinders. By percentage, very little of that data will ever egress - it's low-level and uncalibrated - so a cached strategy could be valuable. Here are some slides giving background on the SWOT/NISAR data system. They are from 2017, so more has happened in the meantime, but they touch on some of these issues: https://smd-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/science-red/s3fs-public/atoms/files/13%20-%20Day%202%20SDS%20Considerations%20for%20SWOT%20and%20NISAR%20-%20Hua.pdf https://smd-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/science-red/s3fs-public/at... Regarding the step function in data volume, see the humorous slide #4.