Earthdata Code Collaborative: Building a Reuseable and Shared Platform for Earth Science Collaboration, Development, and Application Hosting

An ever-growing number of applications to expose, utilize, and process Earth Science data are developed every year. These applications are sometimes developed by large organizations with significant budgets, and at other times by graduate students or professors with short-term grant money and little else. Because of this wide variance in environments, these applications are rarely consistent in their approach to testing, hosting, presentation of information, and approach to maintenance. Many of these applications also continually re-invent solutions to common problems such as bug tracking, collaboration, source code management, user support and feedback, and deployment of new features.

The Earthdata Code Collaborative (https://ecc.earthdata.nasa.gov, typically referred to as the ECC) provides a unified and consistent environment for Earth Science application development, whether an application is developed by a team of 10, 50, or even 1. By using commercial products such as the Atlassian suite of tools (https://www.atlassian.com) and custom APIs, the ECC allows Earth Science applications to focus on science rather than infrastructure and tooling.

This session will detail the process by which the Earthdata Code Collaborative was developed, as well as the initial requirements that drove its inception. It will go on to demonstrate the current state of the ECC, and explore how bringing on applications–both internal to Earthdata and external–has shaped its requirements and implementation. Concepts such as code management, continuous integration (testing), and one-touch deployment will be explored in the context of Earth Science applications.