Ciclops (Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations) website migration to Azure
Context
We’ve been engaged by Carolyn Porco, the leader of the Imaging Team for NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Italian Space Agency Cassini-Huygens mission, to work with a small team to archive and migrate the mission’s website.
Challenge
The website was implemented in PHP and was hosted on a private server. The purpose of the project was to convert it into a static website and move to a cloud environment to ensure global distribution and long-term maintenance.
Solution
The website with over 45GB of assets, including all the images of Saturn and its moons taken by Cassini probe and all related scientific research, was scraped and uploaded to Azure. After testing, we performed a no-downtime swap.
We’ve configured global distribution, caching, and bot protection using Cloudflare.
With more than 80k requests on an average day, around 85% of requests are served from Cloudflare CDN, thanks to proper usage of cache control headers.
We have optimized storage of all assets in Azure, considering redundancy and security requirements. The total cost of hosting the website, including all the bandwidth, is below $2 per month. Yes, that’s $20 per year. And we are proud to cover it.