Keynote: Powering the European Space Agency’s Space Missions with Open Source... A. Whitehouse (ASL)

This talk focuses on the European Space Agency's ambitious plans to double its number of missions by 2030, highlighting the challenges associated with upgrading its IT infrastructure. The speaker discusses the transition from a monolithic mission control software to a more agile, open-source solution. By collaborating with Canonical, the agency aims to implement a Kubernetes-based architecture that offers resilience and integration with existing systems. The session also covers the deployment of data and AI tools like PostgresQL, CFKA, CubeFlow, and Spark to enhance data insights and mission operations. The emphasis on mature open-source software is crucial for meeting the agency's evolving needs while maintaining operational efficiency.

For more than 50 years, the European Space Agency has been serving Europe as its space agency and inspiring its citizens. It fulfills its commitment to the peaceful exploration of space through missions ranging from investigations into dark matter to exploring Jupiter's icy moons, gaining a deeper understanding of forests here on Earth, and even considering what we might do if there's an asteroid on a collision course with the

planet. But issa has even bolder ambitions. By 2030, ISA wants to significantly increase its number of missions, doubling the number of satellites it flies. And this poses a number of challenges, particularly for the IT infrastructure. Historically, like many legacy applications, the mission control software at ISA was a monolith installed directly on the operating system of physical hardware. to automate and scale up. They want a system that

can respond more quickly, reduce downtime, and minimize maintenance windows. They need to be able to make changes to their software and their IT infrastructure, even during missions that last for many years. After reviewing multiple proposals, the European Space Agency selected Canonical for the architecture, design, and delivery of an open-source solution that could power its missions into the future. That architecture starts with Canonicle's Kubernetes, a highly available

platform onto which issa can deploy its workloads and integrate with its existing IT infrastructure. It's resilient so that even if disruption happens or hardware fails, it reduces the impact to running missions for storage. It relies on Canonicle's Charmed SE which provides persistent scalable storage and cost savings because no specialized storage hardware is required. Onto this Canonicle has deployed its data and AI products including PostgresQL, CFKA, CubeFlow

and Spark. These allow issa to gain insights from their data and provide infrastructure to the running missions. For ISA, choosing mature open-source software was critical and partnering with Canonical gave it a single service provider to manage the entire onremise public private cloud and all of these leading open-source applications. At Canonicle, we're very proud to be partnering with ISA to explore new frontiers in open source and