Add blog post on what we did last quarter with NASA VEDA

content/blog/veda-update-q4-2024/index.md

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+# Documentation: https://docs.hugoblox.com/managing-content/
+
+title: "NASA VEDA & 2i2c Update for Q4 2024 (Oct-Dec 2024)"
+subtitle: ""
+summary: ""
+authors: ["Yuvi Panda"]
+tags: []
+categories: []
+date: 2025-01-07T15:18:37-08:00
+lastmod: 2025-01-07T15:18:37-08:00
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+draft: false
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+---
+
+A non-exhaustive list of things 2i2c and [Development Seed](https://developmentseed.org/) did with the [NASA VEDA](https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/data/tools/veda) project last quarter!
+
+## Automated backups and alerting with `jupyterhub-home-nfs`
+
+[Tracking Issue](https://github.com/NASA-IMPACT/veda-jupyterhub/issues/56)
+
+[jupyterhub-home-nfs](https://github.com/2i2c-org/jupyterhub-home-nfs/) is a young project to provide flexible per-user home directory limits on JupyterHub - an important feature for controlling cloud costs. [Tarashish Mishra](https://sunu.in/) and [Sarah Gibson](https://sgibson91.github.io/cv/) have been leading this project for the last few months. Since we are moving away from [AWS Managed EFS](https://aws.amazon.com/efs/) here, we had to do some work to recreate some of the benefits EFS gives us out of the box. During this quarter, we:
+
+1. Set up automated backups so we can recover files in cases of disaster
+2. Set up automated alerting (via prometheus and pagerduty) to know if our backing EBS device is getting full and we need to perform a manual intervention
+3. Deployed this to a few other communities ([CryoCloud](https://www.cryocloud.io/) and [NMFS Openscapes](https://nmfs-openscapes.github.io/)) to broaden adoption.
+
+We will continue doing work on `jupyterhub-home-nfs` in the upcoming quarter! If this is functionality you are interested in deploying, please reach out to us to collaborate!
+
+## Enable users to dynamically build environments with `jupyterhub-fancy-profiles`
+
+[Tracking Issue](https://github.com/NASA-IMPACT/veda-jupyterhub/issues/58)
+
+We covered this more extensively in [another blog post](https://2i2c.org/blog/2024/jupyterhub-fancy-profiles-rollout/), so go read that!
+
+This work in particular is a good demonstrator of 2i2c's value - it started off with a [grant from GESIS](https://2i2c.org/blog/2024/jupyterhub-binderhub-gesis/), and now with support from [NASA IMPACT](https://impact.earthdata.nasa.gov/) we are able to bring it to a *lot* of communities, not just the ones that funded it.
+
+Ongoing work here will focus on improving the UX as well as better documentation so users can actually use it!
+
+## "Open in QGIS" from VEDA UI
+
+[Tracking Issue](https://github.com/NASA-IMPACT/veda-jupyterhub/issues/59)
+
+We had worked in the past with many communities in enabling [QGIS on the Cloud](https://2i2c.org/blog/2023/qgis-greenland/), and this quarter we got closer to enabling a contextual 'Open in QGIS' button in the [VEDA Dashboard](https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/dashboard/)! Here is a quick demo:
+
+<video src="./open-in-qgis.mp4" muted controls></video>
+
+(This shows the workflow when user is already logged into the JupyterHub and had started the server)
+
+You can play with this in [this preview](https://deploy-preview-688--ghg-demo.netlify.app/exploration), although you need to have access to the NASA VEDA hub to fully try it out at this point.
+
+Tarashish from Development Seed is again responsible for most of the work here, available in [jupyter-remote-qgis-proxy](https://github.com/sunu/jupyter-remote-qgis-proxy). You can use it to create 'magic links' that will open QGIS in a desktop environment in your browser, and add a specific layer to it! Our hope is that this allows primarily GIS folks to better use tools they already are familiar with in cloud based contexts.
+
+## Other updates
+
+- We participated heavily in an evaluation process for the authentication and authorization solution to be used across NASA VEDA! [Tracking Issue](https://github.com/NASA-IMPACT/veda-jupyterhub/issues/57)
+- We are very close to [rolling out JupyterHub 5.0](https://github.com/2i2c-org/infrastructure/issues/5209) and associated changes across all our hubs, which will enable us to eventually offer per-group shared directories! [Tracking Issue](https://github.com/NASA-IMPACT/veda-jupyterhub/issues/61)