On Sunday, I detailed the test architecture NASA built on Amazon Web Services to ensure it could handle the anticipated traffic for the live stream of Mars rover Curiosity. The team suggested it would scale up the actual production architecture to handle, and indeed it did.
On Wednesday, AWS published a blog post showing what the final architecture looked like. Not shown in the diagram is CloudWatch, AWS’s monitoring feature that NASA used to watch for and adjust to high demand in particular geographies.
Furthermore, the post details the AWS architecture on which NASA’s Mars rover web site runs, and explains the process by which images from Curiosity make their way back to Earth: “Metadata is stored in Amazon SimpleDB and Amazon [Simple Workflow Service] triggers provisioning of Amazon EC2 instances to process images as each transmission from Curiosity is relayed to Earth.”
