Initialism or acronym? GSaaS wept, your guess is as good as ours: Microsoft gazes upwards with Azure Orbital
(2020/09/22)
- Reference: 1600797248
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/09/22/azure_orbital/
- Source link:
Ignite "Ground-Station-as-a-Service" is what Microsoft is calling its Azure Orbital service (a shame because GaaS would have been a far more puntastic set of letters), unveiled in preview at vendor's Ignite shindig, but if you're hoping for a Natick-style data centre being sent into space, there's bad news.
The aim is to shunt the ground segment of satellite operations into Azure - integrating ground stations, networks, and procedures into a digital platform that the Windows giant will be all too happy to flog to those reluctant to set things up themselves.
Azure Orbital is about hooking up existing ground stations and dedicated antennas to Microsoft's data centres. As well as the ground stations of its chums, Microsoft will also own and operate its own ground stations. Scheduled spacecraft contacts in X, S, and UHF band frequencies will be available via shared high-gain antennas.
[1]Reports of Microsoft's plans for space surfaced earlier this month, and its partners for the endeavour include SES and Viasat, which have already appeared among Redmond's plans to connect hard-to-access places to Azure via its [2]ExpressRoute service .
Azure Orbital's goal is to process the ever-increasing amounts of data generated by satellites at scale afforded by a cloud giant like, er, Microsoft.
It is hardly the only game in town when it comes to dealing with ground stations and data. [3]AWS Ground Station will cheerfully ingest satellite data and shunt it to S3 for storage and other AWS services to wrangle it. Like Microsoft, Amazon is also keen to highlight the ease of simply paying for the time used rather than having to build one's own ground station infrastructure.
Amazon also reckons that up to 80 per cent of the cost of ground station operations can be saved by this approach. The piper, be it any of the giants, will still need paying once that data reaches the cloud.
For Microsoft's part, it sees opportunities for its partners and highlighted SES, an outfit that has been co-locating and operating its next-generation comms gateways (including telemetry, tracking and command systems) alongside Microsoft's finest, as an example scenario for Azure Orbital.
The service, it said breathlessly, "enables you to take full advantage of our global network and services infrastructure to build new product offerings and service chains with the edge, 5G, SD-WAN, and AI."
Assuming, of course, Azure doesn't have one of its [4]special moments just as a satellite passes into range.
We asked Microsoft about this, and also how a customer could control where in the Azure infrastructure its data would end up. We will update should a response be forthcoming. ®
Bootnote
Just kidding, we know the difference. For those who care, or are having trouble drifting off to sleep during these troubled times, initialisms are abbreviations using the first letter of each word of a phrase, pronounced one letter at a time (eg, DNA), and acronyms string the initial letters together to make a pronounceable word (NASA). What would GSaaS do? A little of both, we suspect.
Get our [5]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/14/microsoft_azure_uk_outage/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2019/09/09/azure_expressroute_via_satellite/
[3] https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/09/gartner_on_cloud_aws_fails/
[5] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
The aim is to shunt the ground segment of satellite operations into Azure - integrating ground stations, networks, and procedures into a digital platform that the Windows giant will be all too happy to flog to those reluctant to set things up themselves.
Azure Orbital is about hooking up existing ground stations and dedicated antennas to Microsoft's data centres. As well as the ground stations of its chums, Microsoft will also own and operate its own ground stations. Scheduled spacecraft contacts in X, S, and UHF band frequencies will be available via shared high-gain antennas.
[1]Reports of Microsoft's plans for space surfaced earlier this month, and its partners for the endeavour include SES and Viasat, which have already appeared among Redmond's plans to connect hard-to-access places to Azure via its [2]ExpressRoute service .
Azure Orbital's goal is to process the ever-increasing amounts of data generated by satellites at scale afforded by a cloud giant like, er, Microsoft.
It is hardly the only game in town when it comes to dealing with ground stations and data. [3]AWS Ground Station will cheerfully ingest satellite data and shunt it to S3 for storage and other AWS services to wrangle it. Like Microsoft, Amazon is also keen to highlight the ease of simply paying for the time used rather than having to build one's own ground station infrastructure.
Amazon also reckons that up to 80 per cent of the cost of ground station operations can be saved by this approach. The piper, be it any of the giants, will still need paying once that data reaches the cloud.
For Microsoft's part, it sees opportunities for its partners and highlighted SES, an outfit that has been co-locating and operating its next-generation comms gateways (including telemetry, tracking and command systems) alongside Microsoft's finest, as an example scenario for Azure Orbital.
The service, it said breathlessly, "enables you to take full advantage of our global network and services infrastructure to build new product offerings and service chains with the edge, 5G, SD-WAN, and AI."
Assuming, of course, Azure doesn't have one of its [4]special moments just as a satellite passes into range.
We asked Microsoft about this, and also how a customer could control where in the Azure infrastructure its data would end up. We will update should a response be forthcoming. ®
Bootnote
Just kidding, we know the difference. For those who care, or are having trouble drifting off to sleep during these troubled times, initialisms are abbreviations using the first letter of each word of a phrase, pronounced one letter at a time (eg, DNA), and acronyms string the initial letters together to make a pronounceable word (NASA). What would GSaaS do? A little of both, we suspect.
Get our [5]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/14/microsoft_azure_uk_outage/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2019/09/09/azure_expressroute_via_satellite/
[3] https://aws.amazon.com/ground-station/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/09/gartner_on_cloud_aws_fails/
[5] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/