Demonstration Platform Documentation
- Documentation Home
- Our Approach
- Overview Presentation
- Why not just use Google Earth Engine?
- An Orientation to Cloud Computing for Earth Scientists
- Demonstration Platform
- Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) tier
- Software as a Service (SAAS) Tier
- Authentication, security and user management systems
- EO Browser – Browse, find and manage satellite raster data
- Ground Truth – Browse, find and manage Ground Truth data
- Jupyter Lab – Interactive, scalable data analysis and visualization
- Desktop Apps – Remote desktop capability for analysis and visualization with conventional desktop applications.
- Kubeflow – Large scale batch processing pipelines and machine learning
- Gitlab – Manage and control scripts, programs and docker images
On-demand Personal Ubuntu Desktops in a browser
The Demonstration Platform enables the creation of personal Ubuntu desktop environments and makes these desktops available through a web browser. The ‘desktops in a browser’ means users can use Ubuntu desktop applications to explore platform data, develop applications and conduct analytics without needing to download data to a local PC. The Ubuntu desktops are customizable but pre-configured to packages such as the European Space Agency (ESA) Sentinel Application Toolbox (SNAP) and Quantum GIS for geospatial data viewing and analysis.
To allow for easy access to EO datasets available on the proof of concept platform, EO data stores have been mounted into each user’s desktop environment. The pre-configured data access and storage mount points are listed in the table below.
To allow for easy access to EO datasets available on the proof of concept platform, EO data stores have been mounted into each user’s desktop environment. The pre-configured data access and storage mount points are listed in the table below.
Table: User desktop environments are preconfigured to provide easy access to all platform data stores.
Desktop environment mount point | Description |
/gcp-public-data-sentinel-2 | All Sentinel-2 data (worldwide) as provided by Google’s public data program. This location is read-only. |
/gcp-public-data-landsat | All Landsat data (worldwide; including Landsat 4, 5, 7 and 8) as provided by Google’s public data program. This location is read-only. |
/geoanalytics_user_shared_data | All platform EO data collections including raw datasets and pre-processed datasets (as listed in Table 3). All users can read and write to this location. |
~/geoanalytics_{username} | A user’s personal data storage directory. Only the logged in user can read or write to their own personal storage directory. |

