Data Cubes and Cloud-Native Environments for Earth Observation: An Overview

Reliable access to analysis-ready Earth observation data and infrastructures for processing them has been a challenge with the increasing volumes and variety of data being generated daily through various Earth observation programmes. Recently, concepts centered around building cloud-native infrastructures that provide access to Earth observation data in efficient manners such as data cubes which facilitate rapid querying, filtering and retrieval have been garnering popularity. Moreover, efficient means of processing such vast volumes of data stored in data cubes through cloud computing frameworks such as Kubernetes are becoming more popular. This paper investigates the current state of the art techniques, methods and technologies used in cloud-native environments with a particular focus on the data cube initiative and "bring the user to the data" paradigm.