Shared Services Available on the Science Cloud
The Science Cloud will provide a suite of essential shared services designed to streamline collaboration and project management across the platform. These services are centrally managed and available to all participating projects, removing the need for individual teams to deploy or maintain their own instances.
Included services:
- GitLab – Version control and code repository management.
- Mattermost – A communication and notification platform for operational updates.
- Jira – Project tracking, task management, and issue reporting.
- Confluence – An organized workspace for documentation and knowledge sharing.
By integrating these tools directly into the Science Cloud infrastructure, projects can immediately access reliable, enterprise‑supported collaboration tools without the overhead of standalone setup or maintenance.
The Research Platform
The Research Platform is a sophisticated, fully open-source, multi-tenant cloud environment specifically designed to support scientific workloads for NASA civil servants, contractors, and NASA-funded researchers, including ROSES grant recipients. Please note that the platform is currently in development and is in testing. To gain access and help evaluate the platform, please contact the Science Cloud Research and Innovation Lead, Ramon Ramirez-Linan, at ramon.e.ramirez-linan@nasa.gov. Built on a familiar JupyterLab foundation, it comes enhanced with curated tools for AI-assisted coding (Notebook Intelligence), parallel computing (Dask), and natural language dataset discovery (BExplorer).
This platform represents a significant architectural shift from the previous Open Science Studio (OSS) setup. Delivered as a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution operating on a pay-as-you-go model, it eliminates the $200–$300 per month fixed infrastructure baseline costs previously associated with maintaining an individual deployment in a dedicated AWS account. While you still pay to use the platform, costs are now distributed and directly tied to your actual compute and storage consumption—meaning you only pay for what you actively use. Because it is centralized, resources are managed and monitored with unprecedented granularity. The built-in Resource Tracker provides transparent, real-time reporting of compute costs and usage metrics. This allows individual researchers to monitor their own usage against soft spending limits, while Principal Investigators (PIs) gain comprehensive visibility to track consumption across their entire project portfolio and enforce hard budget limits.
Science and Technology Authorization Realm
The Science and Technology Authorization Realm (STAR) is an open-source, Keycloak-based identity-management and authorization platform supporting NASA research ecosystems. STAR uses a one realm per tenant model. Each onboarded application receives a dedicated Keycloak realm, with user groups and roles configured within that realm according to the tenant's audience and access requirements. STAR is highly customizable for realm administrators and integrates with identity providers like InCommon, ORCID, Login.gov, and various major social media platforms.
The infrastructure runs on AWS and is scaled across multiple availability zones to ensure STAR stays highly available to support the research community, NASA internal users, federated partners, and a wide range of applications.
Support for Additional Low-Level Cloud Service Providers
The Science Cloud team recognizes the interest in expanding support for additional low-level cloud service providers beyond the current offerings. Specifically, platforms such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP), CloudFlare, Wasabi S3, and Tigris S3 have been identified and documented as requested features in the development backlog. However, at the present time, there is no concrete implementation plan or timeline established for integrating these additional cloud service providers in the immediate future. The team continues to evaluate priorities and may revisit these requests as the platform evolves.
Process for Adopting New SaaS Provider Tools
Projects and individual teams maintain the flexibility to continue onboarding and integrating new technologies and SaaS solutions into their workflows, provided that these tools are not explicitly blacklisted or prohibited from use within the NASA environment. It is the responsibility of individual teams to conduct due diligence and identify whether their chosen software has been approved for use within NASA's IT ecosystem. In cases where a specific software application or service is being utilized or under consideration by a widespread audience spanning multiple teams, the Science Cloud team is open to evaluating it as a potential candidate for inclusion as a shared service that could benefit the broader community. If you have interest in specific software solutions and would like to explore the possibility of having them supported directly by the Science Cloud infrastructure, please submit a detailed ticket to support@sciencecloud.nasa.gov with information about the tool and its potential applications.