Astro2020 APC White Paper: Astronomy should be in the clouds

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1907.06320
• Publication Date: 2019-01-01
• Authors: Smith, Arfon M.; Pike, Rob; O'Mullane, William; Economou, Frossie; Bolton, Adam; Momcheva, Ivelina; Bauer, Amanda E; Becker, Bruce; Bellm, Eric; Connolly, Andrew; Crawford, Steven M.; Hathi, Nimish; Melchior, Peter; Peek, Joshua; Solmaz, Arif; Thomson, Ross; TollerudI, Erik; Liska, David W.
• Keywords: 0103 physical sciences; FOS: Physical sciences; Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics; 01 natural sciences; Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM)

Commodity cloud computing, as provided by commercial vendors such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, has revolutionized computing in many sectors. With the advent of a new class of big data, public access astronomical facility such as LSST, DKIST, and WFIRST, there exists a real opportunity to combine these missions with cloud computing platforms and fundamentally change the way astronomical data is collected, processed, archived, and curated. Making these changes in a cross-mission, coordinated way can provide unprecedented economies of scale in personnel, data collection and management, archiving, algorithm and software development and, most importantly, science.