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Materials Project of Berkeley Lab Uses Datadog Cloud Monitoring to Simplify Observability on AWS
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Industries
- Education
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
- Quality Assurance
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
The Materials Project, a research initiative at Berkeley Lab supported by the US Department of Energy, wanted to make its materials research more accessible to a continually growing number of users by updating its monolithic website. The project’s computations drastically reduce the time for researchers to invent new materials, saving months or even years of painstaking work. However, as it scaled to meet US and global demand, its on-premises, monolithic stack strained to power both user and internal needs. The project also lacked insight into service usage and faults. Because the Materials Project is publicly funded, it needed an affordable solution to go along with the modernization of all aspects of its infrastructure stack for a microservice architecture.
About The Customer
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is a US Department of Energy Office of Science lab managed by the University of California. The lab’s Materials Project was founded in 2011 to accelerate materials research and time to market for innovation. The Materials Project calculates fundamental material properties and develops a host of open-source workflow and analysis software to accelerate materials design. The Materials Project data and its tools are helping researchers in industry, education, and government labs by functioning as a springboard for their research. The project’s computations drastically reduce the time for researchers to invent new materials, saving months or even years of painstaking work.
The Solution
The organization turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) Public Sector Partner Datadog to implement a cost-optimized observability solution at scale. The Materials Project used Datadog Infrastructure Monitoring to achieve complete coverage of its estate and Datadog Container Monitoring for multidimensional visibility into containerized environments. It has also employed Datadog’s dashboard capabilities to set up continuous live monitoring screens in its offices. As part of its redesign, the project uses AWS Fargate, a serverless compute service for containers, in combination with Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a fully managed container orchestration service. Using AWS and Datadog, the Materials Project can manage its infrastructure with only a handful of scientists-turned-engineers.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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