Keynote: Powering the European Space Agency’s Space Missions with Open Source So... Aaron Whitehouse

This talk discusses the European Space Agency's (ESA) ambitious plans to increase its missions and the challenges posed to its IT infrastructure. Historically, ESA's mission control software was a monolithic application running on dedicated hardware, which limited its ability to scale and adapt. To address these challenges, ESA has partnered with Canonical to implement an open source solution based on Canonical's Kubernetes platform. This new architecture enables resilience during mission disruptions and integrates existing systems. Additionally, it utilizes Canonical's Charmed Ceph for scalable storage and incorporates various data and AI tools, including PostgreSQL, Kafka, Kubeflow, and Spark, to enhance data insights and mission operations. The collaboration aims to modernize ESA's IT infrastructure to support future space exploration initiatives.

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 ESA has even bolder ambitions. By 2030, ESA 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 ESA 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 Canonical's Kubernetes, a highly

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

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

open source and >> [applause]