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Dynamic software components for your project

The APEx Project Environments are designed to provide managed, configurable environments that support the collaboration, development, exploration, and visualisation of Earth Observation (EO) application project results. These tools are crucial for facilitating the effective sharing, maintenance, and utilisation of project outcomes within the Earth Observation community, ensuring that they remain readily accessible and usable for extended time periods.

APEx aims to cater to the diverse and multifaceted needs of the EO community by delivering Project Environments as Software as a Service (SaaS) products. It manages the delivery of either single-user or shared environments, managed within a unified cloud infrastructure, thus facilitating a wide range of user tasks, including development, hosting, execution, and exploratory analysis of EO applications.

At the core of the APEx Project Environments is the ability for APEx to manage and deliver these environments effectively. Project-wide community-oriented tools, such as the Project Web Portal, Products Catalogue, Documentation Hub, and User Forum, are managed directly by Kubernetes and typically instantiated once per project. Conversely, single-user-specific workspaces allow the instantiation of Apps by a single user at any time, while sharing data across these Apps. These tools, including the User Workspace Finder, the Code Server Interactive Development Environment (IDE), the JupyterLab workspace, the QGIS user workspace, and in certain cases, dashboards and web applications, are all managed by a dedicated ApplicationHub server. This ApplicationHub orchestrates the launch and management of such software deployments, ensuring secured (isolated from other users) and customisable environments for individual users, while allowing targetted file sharing operations among users.

A key feature of the APEx Project Environments is the ability to provide managed, configurable environments. These environments can be tailored to the specific needs of different projects and users, supporting various tasks, including exploratory analysis, development, hosting, and execution of EO applications. This flexibility and configurability allow the project members to focus on their primary research objectives without being bogged down by the technical complexities of setting up and maintaining advanced, Cloud-native workspaces.

Another critical component of the APEx Instantiation Services is the seamless integration with the ESA’s Network of Resources (NoR). The focus is on developing new tools, which are meant to enrich the current NoR Portfolio offering. These new tools are being onboarded into the NoR, making them available as purchasable services. For services that already exist in the NoR Portfolio, such as the ELLIP Studio IDE, the goal is to integrate these through coordination with their provider(s). The technical challenge lies in achieving seamless integration and alignment of business models, ensuring that newly developed and existing services work harmoniously within the APEx.

The specific components of the APEx Project Environments include:

The APEx Project Environments will be essential for ensuring that the results of EO projects are effectively shared and utilised, fostering greater collaboration and innovation within the EO community. By providing robust, scalable, and user-friendly environments, the APEx Project Environments help maximise the impact of EO research and applications.

Learn how the APEx Project Environments facilitate collaborative working environments for various use cases.

Creating a collaborative project environment

As shown in the use cases, APEx offers a flexible suite of tools that can be instantiated independently or integrated to form a cohesive, collaborative project environment. Projects are encouraged to tailor the setup to their specific needs, combining the various APEx tools in ways that enhance collaboration, accessibility, and visibility.

Projects can interconnect their instantiated services in several ways:

  • Integrated Navigation: If a project already has a public-facing website or uses the APEx Project Web Portal, links to the instantiated tools, such as the Geospatial Explorer, Products Catalogue or JupyterLab, can be embedded directly into the site’s navigation structure. This provides a unified access point for project stakeholders and visitors to the project website.

  • Public and Private Tool Segmentation: Projects can choose to expose only selected tools to the public while restricting others to registered team members. For instance, the Geospatial Explorer might be made publicly available for data discovery, while the collaborative JupyterLab remains limited to project members.

By thoughtfully providing access to the APEx instantiated services, projects can create a rich, interactive, and secure environment that supports ongoing collaboration, knowledge sharing, and engagement with both internal and external audiences.