NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS) created the 2024 Eclipse Explorer interactive web application to show the path and timing of the eclipse. This application was first deployed in October 2023 for the Annular Eclipse.

 There were concerns that the SVS on-premises hosting capabilities would be overwhelmed if they hosted such a high-profile public application.

The SMCE worked with the SVS team to host their application in AWS using S3 storage and static hosting, behind the AWS Cloudfront content distribution network (CDN).  This allowed the data to be cached “at the edge” — meaning in multiple locations close to the end user rather than having it come from the origin each time.

Over 7 million unique IP addresses visited the Eclipse Explorer, which provided over 2 billion objects and at the peak (during the 2pm EDT hour on 4/8/24), served data at a peak data transfer load of over 14TB per hour.