[mturmon]

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/at...

Regarding the step function in data volume, see the humorous slide #4.