Alpha Omega’s Cloud Excellence – A Positive Impact on NOAA’s Missions

Introduction

Alpha Omega’s Cloud Center of Excellence (CoE) was incubated with Cloud Engineering patterns, practices, and techniques gathered from our performance at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) within Dept. of Commerce. We have been an integral partner in NOAA’s Journey to cloud modernization since 2018 with strong support from public cloud providers, especially AWS.

Our Cloud Services at NOAA

Our cloud engineering and architecture teams are part of NOAA’s mission focused endeavors at Office of the CIO (OCIO), National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) Assistant CIO (ACIO), NESDIS National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), NOAA Fisheries Southeast Fisheries Science Center (SEFSC), and NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS).

Our support across these groups covers the entire spectrum of Cloud Engineering and Architecture services. This includes:

• Applications: Lift & Shift followed by Cloud Conducive Application refactoring
• Security: Security Governance, FISMA Controls and ATO
• Data management: Petabyte scale Data exchange, Archive, and management
• FinOps: Cost governance and accounts management, Budget Management
• Specialized Architecture/Use Cases
  • High Performance Computing for Weather Algorithms
  • Geospatial Visualization Scalability
  • Satellite Data processing Pipelines
  • Cloud Agnostic CI/CD instrumentations
  • Hybrid Cloud Data Sync

Our services leverage the AWS Cloud Native serverless offerings to their fullest extent to provide scalability with cost savings and lowered operational burden. This includes Kubernetes (EKS) for clustered container management, Aurora for Database scalability, Lambda for event-based processing and S3 for data storage and data exchange.

Transformative Outcomes for NOAA’s Mission

NOAA’s mission requires it to be the Nation’s authoritative environmental intelligence agency by accurately predicting the climate and environmental events that can potentially exact a toll on the economy, human life, and ecosystems. Our support within NOAA has contributed to its mission through delivery of new capabilities and expanding current services in a highly cost-effective manner.

Our work in NOAA has facilitated development of NESDIS Common Cloud Framework (NCCF) that provides a Cloud agnostic common enterprise architecture to empower environmental science and weather business functions through secure infrastructure instrumentation. Within NESDIS NCEI our team has enabled scalability and resilience of NOAA’s VizLab and data archive infrastructure to ensure secure sharing and seamless data availability for environment research.

Within the NOAA OCIO office we contributed to NOAA’s data center consolidation efforts at NOAA’s OCIO to eliminate costly data centers and move enterprise shared services to the AWS cloud. At NWS, our team has established a robust FISMA and NIST RMF Security governance to encompass a hybrid cloud. Collectively our efforts have had a significant impact in securing NOAA’s weather infrastructure and increased its efficiency and effectiveness empowering NOAA to fulfill its mission needs in providing secure & timely access to environmental data and enhancing weather preparedness going forward.