AWS And Insitu Demo Remote Cloud Data Processing

Insitu, a subsidiary of The Boing Company, teamed up with AWS to demonstrate remote cloud data processing, which involved pre-processing and then transferring terabytes of data to Amazon Web Services.

The data was gathered via a drone, and sent to AWS without an internet connection.

Both Insitu technology, and the AWS Snowball service were put to good use here, to accomplish this remarkable task.

Insitu creates solutions for unmanned systems like drones, which can be used to survey, process, and interpret sensor data. It is also the creator of INEXA Cloud that is the part of a suite of resources to process and interpret large amounts of data gathered by unmanned systems to create actionable intel.

This also includes highly complex 3D terrain models.

AWS Snowball, meanwhile, is the service from the cloud giant that enables enterprises to transfer large amounts of pre-processed data to the platform through dedicated physical storage appliances — rather than across the web.

The appliance, known as AWS Snowball Edge, is a 100 TB data transfer device that has onboard storage and compute capability for local processing and edge computing workloads.

As revealed, Insitu deployed a ScanEagle unmanned aerial vehicle, and the UAV flew over a remote area, collecting terabytes of sensor data to surveil over a kilometer of a wall in a remote location in Queensland, Australia.

It flew for less than an hour, but gathered terabytes of data in its flight.

Upon return, its data was downloaded to an AWS Snowball Edge device, pre-processed, had its data integrity validated, and then readied to be transferred to the nearest AWS region. Where it was then directly uploaded into the Insitu AWS account.

An internet connection was, obviously, not required throughout the demo.

The demo served as a modern equivalent of couriering a hard drive when transferring large amounts of data over the internet would have taken too long. Only, with a little cloud flavor thrown in for good measure.