Virtual Infrastructure Optimisation

The increasing volumes of data being produced, curated and made available by research infrastructures in the environmental science domain require services able to optimise the delivery staging and process of data on behalf of researchers. Specialised data services for managing the data lifecycle, for creating and delivering data products, and for customised data processing and analysis, all play a crucial role in how these research infrastructures serve their communities, and many of these activities are time-critical need-ing to be carried out frequently within specific time windows. We describe our experiences identifying the time-critical requirements of environmental scientists making use of computational research support environments. We also present a microservice based infrastructure optimisation suite, the Dynamic Real-time Infrastructure Planner, used for constructing virtual infra-structures for research applications on demand. This chapter is partially based on a recent paper presented in [1].