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Jan 31 2020

What Is Kubernetes?: An Introduction and Overview of the Popular Platform

Over the last several years, Kubernetes has been a developing trend in the tech world, gaining popularity as more and more companies begin to take advantage of cloud-based services. As a non-developer living in a developer world, I wanted to understand more about why we develop our software to work with Kubernetes. So I sat down with INT’s Senior Product Manager Steven Reynolds and Senior Architect James Velasco to learn more about Kubernetes and the advantages of working with it.

Christin: So, Steven, tell me — what in the world is Kubernetes??

Steven: Kubernetes is described as an orchestration platform. It’s usually associated with getting big software up and running. For example, with some of our clients, we have our build set up so that all of the software assets are pushed out and deployed using Kubernetes which takes care of monitoring (pods). If a pod fails, Kubernetes will restart it, and it has nice hooks that can spin up new pods if there’s too much work for one pod to handle.

Christin: What are the advantages of using Kubernetes?

James: Traditionally, you have a service provided by a server. If you migrated, changed, or updated the service, there would be a lot of work to change or configure, set up the new server providing it, and with cloud and cloud providers like AWS, they are moving to automating things. So instead of manually going in and doing all of it, you have tools to automate updating an old version, and switching over to the new one automatically.

Christin: The term microservices is used with Kubernetes — can you go into what microservices does?

James: Microservices is an architectural trend happening right now. Instead of having one big server running everything for a web service, you may have that same web service decomposed into little servers that do separate, well defined parts.

Steven: So the idea of Kubernetes and microservice are different concepts, but they’re talked about together. When using a microservice architecture, it’s an advantage, but it’s also a headache to keep track of all the components.

Christin: So when is it best to use Kubernetes?

Steven: We have 15 to 20 services, and it’s a headache to manage, but you can use Kubernetes to help organize it and help it be more manageable for human beings. There are trade-offs because it makes it better to manage, but there are many tradeoffs as in anything else. It’s the engineer’s dilemma.

James: It tends to only be an advantage if you’re managing a lot of services. So if you’re just managing one or two, then it’s iffy. But if you’re managing 10+ or even just 4 or 5 and those 4 or 5 are made up of 10 or 15 subparts, that is when it makes sense. If I divided all my services like that I may have 10 or 20 and then you may have other vendors or services and you can literally have 100 to 200 of these things. You have to swap out in a unique order and all need to come up and down and all need to be monitored, so that’s what Kubernetes helps you do. Kubernetes is also great to scale up or down.

Christin: That’s really cool. So, Steven mentioned that we have built projects to run on Kubernetes. Does that mean IVAAP can be supported on Kubernetes if requested?

James: Kubernetes is one of the environments that IVAAP targets, if a client requests it. It’s important that we do support it because it is one of the modern deployment styles. And it is common that clients use IVAAP running on Kubernetes. Some clients use Azure or AWS so we have to make sure we can run in all different environments.

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So there you have it. As a growing trend in software development, Kubernetes can be a better way for companies to deploy and maintain software quickly, especially in a cloud environment. For INT, supporting Kubernetes is an important aspect of how we help meet the needs of our many diverse clients. For more information on IVAAP, check out int.com/ivaap or schedule a demo with one of our team.

Dec 05 2019

A Countdown of INTViewer’s Features for the Cloud

2019 has been a year full of milestones. INT celebrated its 30 years and has made IVAAP available to all members of the OSDU consortium as part its demo release. But this year has seen many more achievements, and among them is the consolidation of INT products as a complete ecosystem, an ecosystem centered around geoscience data, built for the cloud. One of the pieces of this ecosystem is INTViewer. With the new year approaching, let’s count down the ways that the latest iteration of this desktop application facilitates the ingestion of your data to the cloud.

Time slices take less disk space

Seismic datasets take a large amount of space. While storage is “cheap” on the cloud, when individual files take terabytes, creating a copy of that file is not an innocuous decision. Time slices provide an excellent visualization of a seismic survey but transposing a dataset effectively creates a copy of that data and not every workflow requires access to all possible time slices.

INTViewer 2019 now offers an option to choose how many time slices you want to create during transposition. Just a few slices is often enough, especially if you maintain a data library and use INT’s solutions to showcase your data to potential customers. The output of the transposition will be a much smaller file, cheaper to host and faster to upload.

Virtual headers save time and reduce storage costs

This feature was actually added in 2018, but is worth mentioning because of the cost savings. When you use INTViewer to prepare data, you might find that some headers are not populated. For example, for acquisition data, you might know the location of the source and the receivers, but not the offset or the location of the midpoint. These two header values can be calculated, and INTViewer proposes to create so-called “virtual headers” that will store this information.

Creating virtual headers doesn’t modify your SEG-Y file. It doesn’t change the size of the small index file that INTViewer creates to make fast data access possible. Without virtual headers, to show the midpoint or the offset, your only solution would be to rewrite your data. Not only this rewriting operation takes time, but it also creates yet another copy of your data, doubling your storage costs.

Quick validation of your data before you upload it to the cloud

New technologies bring new terminologies. One term in particular that has made its debut in the geoscience community moving to the cloud is the term of “snowball”. A snowball is the physical transport solution that cloud providers offer when the network becomes impractical to move large data files to the cloud. This is a painful process to “ship” your data with a snowball and even when network bandwidth does allow reasonable upload times, there is certainly no time to do it twice.

INTViewer has been designed to allow immediate quality control of your data. Drag and drop your SEG-Y file to INTViewer’s desktop, and you’ll visualize traces immediately. Performing a spectrum analysis is two clicks away. And there is no need to set up a project. After indexing your dataset locally, verifying the location of your data on a map is also instantaneous. This is a simple way to confirm the validity of the location headers and coordinate reference system prior to ingestion.

As you upload more and more data to the cloud, your validation process needs to become systematic. This is where the automation of INTViewer comes in handy. INTViewer is scriptable through Python, allowing you to repeat the exact same validation steps prior to ingesting your data to the cloud.

A more efficient and useful index file

Users of INTViewer are familiar with the .XGY file, an XML file that INTViewer creates during indexing. This file contains the meta data of a SEG-Y file after it’s been indexed. The format of this file has been changed in 2019 in two ways:

The meta-data of an indexed SEG-Y is now visible in the .XGY file. An example of such meta-data is the amplitude statistics (minimum amplitude, maximum amplitude, average, RMS). These statistics used to be stored in the companion binary .IGX file. Exposing these statistics in plain text allows our customers to extract this information in an automated manner just by parsing the .XGY file. This is especially useful if you are building your own data lake.

When indexing a 2D line, INTViewer automatically calculates the trajectory of that line. Likewise, when indexing a post-stack or a pre-stack, INTViewer derives the outline of this survey. This information was always stored in the .XGY file, but its projection to WGS84 was not… until 2019. While it’s also valuable information to extract and store in a proprietary database, cloud solutions such as IVAAP benefit from reading the projected geometry of a dataset instead of having to calculate it. The data loads faster on a map because there is only one file from the cloud to read to get all the meta-data, instead of two with an index from 2018. The number of files to read is important because cloud APIs consume more resources when accessing multiple files compared to the same accesses on a local file system.

Integration with IVAAP through the INTGeo plugins

Historically, the INTGeo plugins of INTViewer were written to access files posted on INTGeoServer. INTGeoServer is a lightweight geoscience server often used in conjunction with INT’s HTML5Viewer. INTViewer has long been able to efficiently visualize seismic and well datasets posted on INTGeoServer.

Likewise, with the release of INTViewer 2019, INTViewer can also access data posted in IVAAP. This means that if you have ingested your seismic datasets to Amazon S3, you can visualize these datasets in INTViewer by just pointing this application to your IVAAP instance. INTViewer is storage-agnostic and its tools (2D, 3D, F-K, Spectrum, etc.) will work without extra steps, as if the data was local.

This capability is quite useful to conclude an ingestion workflow. After you upload one or several datasets, you typically want to verify that your data wasn’t corrupted during this process, or simply that all files were posted. With the INTGeo plugins, you do not need to open IVAAP to perform this step, it can be done from the same desktop application used to flight-test this data prior to ingestion.

IVAAP supports multiple cloud vendors. In addition to Amazon S3, you can visualize data posted both to Microsoft Azure Blob Storage and Google Cloud Storage. If IVAAP has been deployed to access these data stores, you only need your IVAAP credentials and INTViewer to open the datasets they contain. This also applies to all files posted in an IVAAP “geofiles” connector, whether they are seismic (SEG-Y, SEP) or well (LAS, DLIS) files.

This concludes our countdown (happy new INTViewer?). While INTViewer stands on its own as an application for QA and QC, it is also a useful companion to a cloud ingestion workflow in general, and to IVAAP in particular. You reached this far—contact us for a demo or an evaluation!

Sep 16 2019

Bluware and Interactive Network Technologies, Inc. (INT) Secure Strategic Partnership

INT and Bluware Partner to Offer Volume Data Store (VDS) Seismic Data Format as part of Open Subsurface Data Universe (OSDU) Release 2

HOUSTON, TX – September 16, 2019 – Bluware Corp., the digital innovation platform for seismic data, is pleased to announce a strategic partnership with Interactive Network Technologies, Inc. (INT), a leader in multi-domain visualization in exploration and production (E&P).

Bluware and INT are early members in the Open Subsurface Data Universe (OSDU), a forum focused on developing a standard that creates a common data platform for all exploration, development, and well data. The standard will transform the way subsurface data is captured, analyzed, and operated.

INT and Bluware are collaborating to integrate Volume Data Store (VDS), a data format with adaptive streaming technology for seismic data storage, into IVAAP, an upstream data visualization platform.

Bluware has more than 20 years of experience enabling customers to store, access, and utilize large signal datasets. At the core of Bluware’s technology portfolio is VDS, which can intelligently manage all types of seismic data, including pre-stack, post-stack, WAZ, and more as demanded by an organization’s business needs, workflows, and infrastructure requirements. It can also transfer legacy formats such as SEG-Y or SEP using advanced on-the-fly transcoding on-premise or in the cloud.

INT has 30 years of experience in subsurface data visualization. IVAAP is an HTML5 data visualization platform for E&P workflows in the cloud that empowers product owners, developers, and architects to accelerate the delivery of subsurface digital solutions for oil and gas. Rather than develop complex G&G and petrophysical visual workflows from scratch, companies can leverage the IVAAP platform and customize it in a fraction of the time. Deployable in any cloud environment (Azure®, GCP®, AWS®), IVAAP can scale to meet the needs of tens to thousands of users.

“We are excited about this partnership. IVAAP multi-domain data visualization will benefit from the adoption of VDS optimized seismic format. Together, the technologies will significantly increase the velocity at which G&G business decisions can be made,” says Dr. Olivier Lhemann, President and Founder of INT.

This partnership will result in the integration of VDS for current IVAAP customers at the end of October 2019. Later this year, INT will offer IVAAP for OSDU Release 2, which will include full support for OpenVDS, the open source version of VDS.

“We are excited to welcome INT to the Bluware platform. The IVAAP solution is one of the first cloud-native visualization solutions in E&P. INT’s extensive industry experience brings further validation to the Bluware platform. Our partnership expedites digital transformation initiatives for our customers looking for early success in their journey to the cloud,” says Dan Piette, CEO at Bluware.

About Bluware Corp.
Bluware enables oil and gas companies to solve the most challenging objectives in the petrotechnical world. E&P companies use Bluware to achieve previously unthinkable workflows using cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and interactive machine learning for seismic data applications and workflows. For further information, visit www.bluware.com.

About Interactive Network Technologies, Inc. (INT)
For three decades, we’ve created products that help oil and gas companies visualize, monitor, and analyze their data. From customizable widgets to out-of-the-box applications, our expert visualization solutions offer unparalleled flexibility for both scientific industries and business, and our HTML5/web-enabled visualization technologies are rock-solid and network-secure. For further information, visit www.int.com.

For more information about IVAAP or INT’s other data visualization products, please visit www.int.com.

Read the press release on PRWeb.

INT, the INT logo, and IVAAP are trademarks of Interactive Network Technologies, Inc., in the United States and/or other countries.

Open Subsurface Data Universe™ and OSDU™ are trademarks of The Open Group.

Aug 09 2019

In Retrospect: 10 Years at INT

This month of July marks a significant personal milestone since I have worked at INT for 10 years. 10 years is a long time, especially in technology where paradigm changes occur approximately every three years. Yes, the word “paradigm” was actually in vogue the year I started at INT—that’s how long it’s been. For this anniversary, I’d like to take you on a chronological tour of my experience.

The Formative Years

The first two years at INT were spent learning the many aspects of the application and the science I was working on: INTViewer and subsurface data. I liked joining a new team and getting acclimated to a new code base. I learned a lot from INTViewer’s architect. For example, he helped me understand the significance of making aspects pluggable. Not only does it serve INTViewer as a platform, but it allows the code to evolve without getting out of control. Following this principle, INTViewer’s code base has been able to grow several folds. And we’ll see that the plugins approach served me well in other projects over the course of 10 years.

Growing with INTViewer and INTGeoServer

After the first two years on the job, I picked up more responsibilities. Becoming the “ultimate resort for INTViewer questions” affected me in a way I didn’t anticipate. When I first started, whenever someone asked me a question I could not answer, my internal dialogue went something like, “I don’t know that part of the system. Who is the best person to ask for help on this?” After two years, this changed to: “I have been in this situation before. I know I will find the answer.” This somewhat irrational belief that I can answer any question thrown my way has helped me quite a bit when it comes to solving problems and helping others. When a coworker has a tough technical question, I didn’t anticipate I would one day answer, “Let’s find out!” with such confidence.

The needs of INT’s customers have changed over 10 years. One particular concern that has been pervasive across that time period is the ubiquity of data. Before “cloud” became the new word in vogue, customers often came to me with this problem: “I have teams all across the world, but I don’t want to maintain a worldwide file system. Visualization needs to be fast for all, without having to duplicate data. What do I do?” It’s out of these conversations that INTGeoServer, another pluggable platform, came to be.

INTViewer had years of experience built in to how to access data files efficiently, but, as a product, it needed to move beyond the file system. This was a complex technical challenge and an opportunity to widen the team’s technical skills.

INT gave me other opportunities to innovate: the integration of Python with INTViewer is quite unique in the market. Looking back, even though the technical solutions to reach “data ubiquity” have changed over the years, even though we introduced new ways to automate geoscience workflows, the fundamental work on geoscience data hasn’t evolved much. While software can be a scary place with its rate of change, I find that the geoscience learnings from my first two years are still relevant.

Building IVAAP and the Future of Ubiquitous Data

The latest evolution of ubiquitous data is cloud-based. The last three years have been a sort of new beginning for me since I’ve been tasked with leading the data side of IVAAP. Most of the IVAAP backend was essentially written from scratch, which is very satisfying as a developer. What is even more satisfying was working with the development team and seeing it grow. Since the backend was written by this team, there is no longer an “ultimate resort for questions” role. With the recent work with the OSDU consortium, I am happy and proud that the architectural decisions we made over the last three years have shown we are going in the right direction. This was recently validated by making IVAAP compatible with the OSDU platform. This work didn’t require any changes to IVAAP’s SDK—IVAAP’s OSDU implementation is actually just a plugin for this backend.

A Developer Culture

Working on INTViewer, INTGeoServer, and IVAAP for a grand total of 10 years, what has made me show up every morning has been the deep technical aspects of the job, the products I have been able to work on, and the people I interact with. INT has been a wonderful opportunity for me because of its technological leadership. If a developer says “I need X to achieve Y,” this gets immediate attention because the company culture is very developer-friendly. If you are a developer at heart like I am, being able to write code all day without interruptions is a significant perk of the job. Frankly speaking, these 10 years were also possible because developers at INT are seen as an investment, not a cost. Unlike other companies, INT has a strong will to weather tough economic cycles without shrinking its staff. I have grown with INT, and we both keep growing together (we are hiring, by the way). As a leader, I strive to help today’s new hires to have the same positive experience I had.

Jun 04 2019

INT’s Leading Upstream Data Visualization Platform, IVAAP 2.3, Boosts Digital Solutions with Large Dataset Covisualization Capabilities, Machine Learning in the Cloud

Cloud storage connectors, ArcGIS and PPDM integrations are part of the many new features of the latest release of IVAAP (2.3) which pushes the limits of what’s possible in Subsurface Data Visualization in web applications.

Houston, TX — May 29, 2019 — INT announced today a major release in enterprise upstream data visualization—IVAAP™ 2.3.

This version has significantly developed support for visual-based data discovery using map-based search, and is fully integrated with ArcGIS, allowing explorers to search structured and unstructured data in a data lake or any other file repository. IVAAP supports elastic search as well as other search engines and is able to index and read any subsurface data types.

IVAAP 2.3 continues to break data silos by supporting several new data connectors, including PPDM databases, S3 Bucket, Azure Blob Container, GCP Bucket, and more. These new connectors facilitate data aggregation and complement the existing WITSML, SQL, ProdML, and Osi PI connectors.

“This release of IVAAP demonstrates INT’s commitment to supporting our clients throughout their digital transformation by incorporating more advanced integration and domain visualization capabilities. Effective covisualization of subsurface data is a major barrier to productive collaboration among explorers. IVAAP is designed to increase collaboration across teams, regions, and stages of operations, and increase transparency of exploration, drilling and production activities whether in a data lake or on-premise.”

—Dr. Olivier Lhemann, President of INT, Inc.

INT already actively works with other majors and services companies in the industry to transform the way subsurface data is captured, standardized, analyzed, and made available across applications to enable automation, processing, machine learning, and interoperability. To further support this goal, INT joined the Open Subsurface Data Universe™ (OSDU) consortium and has made IVAAP available as part of the Demo release of the OSDU platform planned for the beginning of Summer 2019.

“We are excited about how OSDU—with partners like INT—will be able to break application silos by establishing a common standard utilizing data platform to centralize subsurface data access. INT’s participation is important to help us visualize key subsurface data types. IVAAP provides a unique service for the industry—it enables explorers to simply search data, select it, and apply machine learning and visualize the results, all in one place, significantly streamlining workflows.”

—Johan Krebbers, VP IT Innovation at Shell

IVAAP 2.3 includes more advanced upstream data visualization features such as well correlation, support for 2D/3D horizons (grid surface), and the ability to display well and schematic data—core images, casing, well logs, mud log, trajectory, and lithography.

This functionality, coupled with the ability to mesh data from different sources, gives data scientists, geologists, and petroleum engineers who want to gain deeper visibility and identify new exploration opportunities an intuitive and user-friendly experience.

For product owners, architects, and IT professionals, IVAAP simplifies the development and deployment of highly integrated and scalable applications, lowering the cost of ownership and allowing them to focus on their specific IP, science, and workflows.

Visit us online at int.com/ivaap or at our booth at EAGE in London June 3–6 for a preview of IVAAP or for a demo of INT’s other data visualization products.

For more information, please visit www.int.com or contact us at intinfo@int.com.

About INT:

INT is a software provider of Data Visualization toolkits and platforms used in highly complex domains such as Oil & Gas, Geoscience, and more. INT Software uses the latest technologies such as HTML5 and JavaScript to create cloud-enabled and mobile-responsive solutions in E&P.

For 30 years, INT’s visualization libraries, widgets, and frameworks have been used by the leaders in G&G, Oil Exploration, and Production such as Schlumberger, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, Halliburton, Paradigm, Baker Hughes, a GE company, etc., to empower best-in-class business applications for seismic, geosciences, well intelligence, drilling ops, and utilities.

INT’s software portfolio includes: GeoToolkit.JS, a suite of 2D/3D data visualization libraries built for web and mobile-responsive applications in JavaScript (well log, seismic, contour, schematics, BHA, maps, time series, gauges, histograms); INTViewer, an E&P data validation and visualization application; and IVAAP, a best-in-the-industry enterprise data visualization application for real-time data aggregation and analysis (domain, G&G, drilling, production, WellLog, 3D, schematics, seismic, and more).