Speaking at the launch of The Open Group’ launch of the OSDU ‘Mercury’ edition (see also our last issue), Phillip Jong (OSDU & Shell) traced the evolution of OSDU from 2018, when Shell seeded the initiative with its in-house developed subsurface data universe (SDU). In 2019, Schlumberger threw OpenDES, an open source edition of its Delfi data infrastructure, into the mix. In the same year, cloud-based editions of the platform were announced for Azure, AWS, GCP and IBM. Since OSDU kicked-off, some 200 ‘active’ software developers have spent a million plus minutes on Webex and technical subcommittees. The Open Group has contributed branding, support, recruiting and marketing, ‘all during COVID’.
James Moran from BP’s ‘Dataworx’ unit placed OSDU in the context of BP’s 40-year journey across different IT systems and ‘deep but somewhat siloed’ technologies. The last five years have seen a shift away from BP data centers with a move to ‘cloud first’ deployment. With OSDU, BP hopes to reduce deployment costs. BP has ‘10 to 30’ people working on its Azure system of record effort and the intent is to leverage OSDU here alongside a ‘twin cloud’ AWS component. OSDU is also germane to the ‘new BP’ and its vaunted transformation to net zero ‘by 2050 or sooner’. A mooted OSDU ‘R3++’ will embrace new energy, digital twin and emissions.
Shell’s Johan Krebbers presented the Mercury release, now supported in the AWS, Azure, Google and IBM clouds. OSDU R3 is secure and extensible, providing microservices for authentication and authorization – ‘who gets access to what’. Web domain APIs expose well data and seismics, Bluware’s OpenVDS is a core component. OSDU supports both platform as a service and software as a service deployment to suit large and small operators. The code is ‘all open source on Gitlab’.
Mercury includes orchestration and workflow services to ingest data, extract metadata and tagging according to company policy and data residency requirements. Some 100 data types are ready to roll. Data ingestion implies a major data migration project for operators, moving data from the deep legacy silos through Apache AirFlow and DAG. Also new in R3 are Domain Data management services (DDMS), a means of adding new data sources via a schema service API. Support for Schlumberger’s OpenZGY compressed seismic data format was also announced.
One of Krebbers’ slides showed a range of data sources (ProSource, R5000/OpenWorks, OSIsoftPI, IHS …) and an ingestion pipeline. We asked if the intent was for a big, one-off data migration from these major industry data sources that would then be retired? Krebbers replied ‘These are now legacy. All OSDU data sits on top of cloud services. Migration from Prosource is envisaged, OpenWorks is a very different story*. Ideally, this would be a onetime migration to an OSDU SOR in the cloud. But this will take time, and will likely involve a hybrid environment’. The ‘daunting’ migration problem ‘will be solved by the power of the Forum, which will provide these services’.
Krebbers then fleshed out the OSDU roadmap for the next couple of years. An R3+ release sees the universe expanding into drilling and production. R3++ (planned for 2022) covers further expansion to real time data across Solar, Windfarms, Hydrogen, CCUS and Geothermal domains in what will become the ‘Open Energy Platform’ (you read it here Oil IT Journal first!). OSDU is also to collaborate, notably with the IOGP on engineering digital twins. OSDU is also to be an ‘optimized data platform for AI work*’.
The R3 ‘operational’ release of OSDU has sparked off a host of offerings centered on the open platform. Many application vendors presented briefly during the launch event. Others participated in cloud vendors OSDU platforms – Amazon and IBM. There are enough vendor announcements to fill a whole issue of Oil IT Journal so we will be brief. Twenty plus partners and customers participated in the launch of Amazon’s OSDU platform in a Harts Energy webinar. IBM has also launched an OSDU platform leveraging its Cloud Pack for Data Industries and Red Hat’s Open Shift containers . Microsoft’s OSDU offerings transit through partners, Schlumberger and, as we announced in our last issue, Cognite. At a Reuters event, Schlumberger explained however that alongside its Microsoft Azure preference ‘for public cloud work’, it was collaborating with IBM/RedHat ‘for private clouds’.
* But see the recent LinkedIn post announcing DecisionSpace365 as running on OSDU.
** However not all Shell’s AI enthusiasts have opted for the OSDU route. See the article on the Shell. BakerHughes/C3 OpenAI initiative elsewhere in this issue.
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