NASA AVAIL (images.nasa.gov): Giving the World Direct Access to NASA’s Universe of Media

NASA AVAIL (images.nasa.gov): Giving the World Direct Access to NASA’s Universe of Media

CLIENTNASAPILLAREngineeringSERVICESCloud-Native App Dev / API / Infrastructure as Code / CI/CD / AWS

Highlights

  • Built after three previous vendors failed, unifying eleven separate NASA Center libraries into a single, publicly accessible platform
  • Grew to over 160,000 media assets, all conforming to federal 508 accessibility standards
  • Cloud-native architecture built on infrastructure-as-code, enabling automatic scaling from minimal presence to agency-level demand
  • RESTful API supports direct ingestion from legacy NASA digital asset management systems and third-party consumption
  • Recognized by NASA as one of the agency’s first cloud-native applications and featured as an AWS government case study in infrastructure-as-code deployments
  • Covered by CNN, TechCrunch, Business Insider, and Smithsonian at launch
  • NASA IT Innovation Fund award recipient

Challenge

Each of NASA’s eleven field centers maintained an independent library of media assets organized around its own subject area and mission. Johnson Space Center’s library focuses on human spaceflight. Ames Research Center covers aeronautics research. Each center had its own interface, search methodology, and standards for metadata, resolution, and download options. Finding a specific asset, or simply exploring what existed, required searching multiple systems independently, with no guarantee that any result would surface the best available version of a file.

The libraries varied widely in mobile responsiveness, 508 accessibility compliance, and the consistency of what they offered users at the point of download. The experience was frustrating in ways that compounded: a researcher or journalist looking for a specific image might search three or four systems, find different versions of the same asset with no indication of which was highest quality, and encounter download interfaces that varied from center to center.

NASA had been working on this problem for years. Three separate attempts to solve it had failed before V! Studios was brought in.

Action

V! Studios built AVAIL, the Agency Video Audio Image Library, as a cloud-native, centralized platform giving the public, NASA content administrators, researchers, educators, and media organizations direct access to NASA’s full archive of images, audio, and video assets through a single, consistent interface at images.nasa.gov.

The architecture was designed from the start to avoid the failure modes of the three previous attempts. Rather than treating the application as a single large system, V! Studios divided its requirements into discrete, independently deployable mini-services, each running on the minimum infrastructure needed for its specific function. An automated workflow coordinates these services, activating only what a given task requires. This kept operational costs down throughout the application’s lifecycle and simplified ongoing maintenance.

All structured data is stored in NoSQL databases, providing the horizontal scaling that relational databases cannot support at the volume and variability of NASA’s media holdings. AVAIL is deployed as a RESTful API, allowing it to integrate with third-party applications and avoiding the architectural dead end of becoming another siloed legacy system after a few years. The interface is responsively designed for screens of any size, fronted by a CDN for fast, cache-enabled delivery globally.

The API supports direct ingestion from NASA’s legacy digital asset management systems at each center, so content curators do not need to abandon their existing workflows to contribute to AVAIL. Authenticated NASA content administrators access the platform using their PIV credentials through NASA’s enterprise single sign-on system, and can upload content or update media and metadata directly through a web interface.

The entire hosting infrastructure is scripted for predictable, repeatable deployments that scale automatically between minimal cloud presence and full agency-level demand. AVAIL can support the ingestion of multi-terabyte media assets without infrastructure changes. V! Studios used open-source resources throughout and delivered complete source code repositories and documentation to NASA. The agency owns the application outright, with no third-party licensing obligations.

Development used CI/CD and test automation across a sequence of development, staging, and production environments, enabling rapid iteration and allowing the final application to include features and capabilities that could not have been specified at the outset of the project.

Result

AVAIL launched as images.nasa.gov and quickly grew to over 160,000 media assets across all 11 NASA Centers, all conforming to the federal government’s Section 508 accessibility standard. Content curators at every center embraced the platform and its API and began actively ingesting content.

The platform was recognized by NASA as one of the agency’s first cloud-native applications and featured by Amazon Web Services as a government case study in infrastructure-as-code deployments. At launch, it received coverage from CNN, TechCrunch, Business Insider, and Smithsonian. V! Studios received the NASA IT Innovation Fund award for the project.

AVAIL supports keyword search, metadata filtering, content type, NASA Center, media ID, most popular, latest uploads, and date range. Users can view results as a list or a grid of thumbnail previews and download assets at low, medium, high, or original resolution.

ImpactWhy It Matters

Three vendors had taken on this problem before V! Studios. The failure rate was not coincidental. Consolidating eleven independent library systems, each with its own legacy infrastructure, content standards, and administrative workflows, into a single platform that the public could use without friction required solving problems that reappeared at every layer of the stack: data architecture, authentication, accessibility compliance, infrastructure scalability, and content ingestion.

V! Studios solved them by making deliberate architectural choices from the start, rather than trying to accommodate legacy constraints that had defeated previous attempts. The decision to build cloud-native and API-first, to use infrastructure-as-code for repeatable deployments, and to design for horizontal scaling from day one were not incidental. They were the reasons the platform worked when the others had not.

At 10 years old, AVAIL is also one of the clearest examples in V! Studios’ portfolio of what it means to build something cloud-native that lasts. The application was designed so that NASA owns it completely, can maintain it without dependency on V! Studios, and can scale it as the archive grows. That is what mission-critical software for a client like NASA requires, and it is the standard V! Studios applies to every engagement.