Spacecrafts Made Simple: How Loft Orbital Delivers Unparalleled Speed-to-Space and Reliability Using Telegraf, InfluxDB Cloud and Google Cloud Today, access to space requires custom engineering, driving up costs, unpredictable schedule delays, and increased risk. Loft Orbital is changing that. Loft Orbital flies and operates customer payloads on their microsatellites as a service.. Companies turn to Loft Orbital when they want to focus on their end-use, with Loft Orbital operating their satellites using its mission agnostic, flexible operating system and interfacing technology. Loft Orbital's Payload Hub Technology provides clients with a modular payload adapter which can fly any payload on identical, commodity satellite buses it keeps in inventory while Cockpit, it's mission control system is used to operate all customer missions as a single constellation. By standardizing this technology, Loft Orbital has been able to deliver unparalleled speed-to-space without sacrificing reliability. Discover how Loft Orbital uses Telegraf, InfluxDB Cloud and Google Cloud to collect and store IoT sensor data from their equipment - including spacecrafts! In this webinar, Caleb MacLachlan will dive into: Loft Orbital's approach to QA-ing their code and enabling better performance monitoring Their methodology for monitoring their infrastructure, including servers and containers, and How a time series platform empowers long-term trend analysis

1. July 2021
SPACE MADE SIMPLE™
HOW LOFT LEVERAGES INFLUXDB
CALEBMACLACHLAN

2. LOFT ORBITAL
PROPRIETARY
LOFT ORBITAL
Agenda
- Loft Overview
- Why Influx
- Implementation Process
- Current State
- Issues Encountered
- Questions

3. LOFT ORBITAL PROPRIETARY
C O M PA N Y O V E R V I E W
Loft Orbital is a leading provider of Space Infrastructure as a Service,
making space simple
Status: Series A Startup, 20+ Million
Raised
Staff: 60+ mixing tech-savvy and space
people
Facilities:
• San Francisco, California (HQ)
• Boulder, Colorado
• Toulouse, France (EMEA office)
CORPORATE
Rapid access to space
High-performance, heritage spacecraft
End-to-end solution
Onboard our YAM* high-performance and reliable satellites, we
fly the payloads of our customers fast and at low-cost
Reduced cost for the customer
* YAM: Yet Another Mission
A full-service approach

4. LOFT ORBITAL
PROPRIETARY
LOFT ORBITAL
Satellites for Flexible Payload Accommodation
4
Loft Payload Hub
Customer Payloads
Integrated Hub with Payloads Standard Satellite Bus Spacecraft
Mission Control
(Multiple bus partners)
Modular Payload Hub architecture eliminates bespoke bus engineering and
facilitates multi-payload shared missions

5. LOFT ORBITAL
PROPRIETARY
LOFT ORBITAL
Example: YAM-2 Mission
5
Cockpit mission operations, data
delivery
Integrated space vehicle
(BCT bus, Loft Payload Hub, customer payloads)
Integrated Payload Hub
Payload & Hub integration
independent from satellite bus
YAM: Yet Another Mission
Customer Payloads
Customer
payloads

6. LOFT ORBITAL
PROPRIETARY
LOFT ORBITAL
Example: YAM-3 Mission
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YAM-3 SQM vibration test
Customer Payloads

7. LOFT ORBITAL
PROPRIETARY
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Where Are They Now?
7

8. LOFT ORBITAL
PROPRIETARY
LOFT ORBITAL
Mission Operations
Authorized
Customer User
Cockpit Services &
Storage
Secure
Cloud*
Loft Orbital Mission
Operations
(San Francisco)
Customer End-Point
UI and API access
Telemetry & Mission Data
Cockpit provides:
- Highly-automated operations for both single missions and
distributed constellations
- The capability for short-notice and event-triggered tasking
- Authority over satellite maneuvering within safety envelopes
- Simple external integrations to enable automated tasking from
external sources
- End-to-end encryption (AES-256)
- API and web-based UI access
The Cockpit Mission Control System (MCS) is a cloud-based tool
for automated mission tasking, monitoring, and data routing
*Cockpit can also be deployed on-premise or in private cloud

9. LOFT ORBITAL
PROPRIETARY
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Mission Operations

10. WHY INFLUX?

11. LOFT ORBITAL
PROPRIETARY
LOFT ORBITAL
Timeseries Database Needs
Spacecraft Operations
- Large volumes of highly critical
spacecraft telemetry
- Scaling for 500 million
measurements/day
- Need near-real-time visualizations
- Easy access for engineers
- Long-term trending is crucial
- Limit Checking & Alerting

12. LOFT ORBITAL
PROPRIETARY
LOFT ORBITAL
Timeseries Database Needs
Data Sharing
- Loft’s unique multi-tenant model
requires careful data segregation
- Bus suppliers also need easy access
to data

13. LOFT ORBITAL
PROPRIETARY
LOFT ORBITAL
Timeseries Database Needs
Software Performance Monitoring
- Ingesting 10,000,000+ measurements
per 10-minute pass
- Low latency is critical
- Python
- Django

14. LOFT ORBITAL
PROPRIETARY
WHAT WERE WE USING BEFORE
▶ Django backend + ORM
▶ PostgreSQL RDB (no
timeseries-specific
optimizations)
▶ GraphQL API layer
▶ Graphene to connect
database layer to API
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15. LOFT ORBITAL
PROPRIETARY
LOFT ORBITAL
Why InfluxDB?
- Familiarity
- Large user base & community
- Grafana query builder
- InfluxDB subscriptions and Kapacitor
- Low barrier of entry

16. IMPLEMENTATION

17. LOFT ORBITAL
PROPRIETARY
LOFT ORBITAL
Initial Architecture

18. LOFT ORBITAL
PROPRIETARY
LOFT ORBITAL
Initial Architecture Issues
- Doesn’t fulfill Spacecraft Ops
performance requirements
- Long duration queries very slow
- Bottleneck writing to DB
- Performance degradation on order
of days due to table size
- No customer-specific data filtering
- Not scalable

19. LOFT ORBITAL
PROPRIETARY
LOFT ORBITAL
Design Architecture

20. LOFT ORBITAL
PROPRIETARY
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Design Architecture Challenges
- InfluxDB Cloud 2.0 does not support
subscriptions/streaming (yet)
- Cloud 2.0 InfluxQL compatibility layer
stability issues
- No InfluxDB – GraphQL connector
libraries exist

21. LOFT ORBITAL
PROPRIETARY
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Current Architecture

22. LOFT ORBITAL
PROPRIETARY
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Software Performance Monitoring Design
Goals
- Capture how long each step of a
process took, every time
- Production-safe
- Low implementation overhead
- Handle 1000s of operations per
second
Design
- Performance Monitoring object that
collects metrics
- Context manager that times actions
- Method to publish discrete metrics
(e.g. queue length)
- Writes to Influx performed in bulk and
only at safe junctures
- All performance monitoring
disabled/enabled with env var

23. RESULTS

24. LOFT ORBITAL
PROPRIETARY
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Example Dashboard - Overview

25. LOFT ORBITAL
PROPRIETARY
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Example Dashboard - ADCS

26. LOFT ORBITAL
PROPRIETARY
ALERTING
Grafana Alerting, because:
▶ Grafana is already a key
part of our Ops flow
▶ Visualizations
▶ Great flexibility in alert
design
▶ Ability to alert based on
1.8 OSS data or Cloud 2.0
data
26

27. LOFT ORBITAL
PROPRIETARY
FEDERATION
▶ Created adapter for
Graphene to integrate
Influx with existing API
▶ Supports Relay,
including pagination
▶ Measurements & Fields
in InfluxDB relationally
linked to PostgreSQL
▶ 10x speed
improvement over prior
solution
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28. LOFT ORBITAL
PROPRIETARY
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Example Performance Monitoring Code
…
…

29. LOFT ORBITAL
PROPRIETARY
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Example Performance Monitoring Dashboard

30. CHALLENGES & NEXT STEPS

31. LOFT ORBITAL
PROPRIETARY
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Challenges & Workarounds
Challenge Workaround
No Subscriptions in Cloud 2.0 Use 1.x locally. Kapacitor publishes to multiple Cloud 2.0
buckets.
Cloud 2.0 InfluxQL stability issues Keep local 1.x as fallback
Auth tokens tied to user account in Cloud 2.0 Use shared admin account to manage tokens
No filtering below Measurement level in Kapacitor Filter using Telegraf, which supports wildcards in
drop_fields (TBI)
Talk to InfluxData team, leverage community

32. LOFT ORBITAL
PROPRIETARY
WHAT’S NEXT
▶ Scale Up
▶ Move towards initial design
▶ Requires replacement of 1.x
subscription functionality
▶ Advanced filtering for customers
▶ Switch to Telegraf instead of
Kapacitor
▶ Switch to Flux language
▶ Depends on InfluxData, Grafana, or
the community developing Flux
query builder
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33. JOIN US!
https://www.loftorbital.com/careers
Email me your resume:
caleb@loftorbital.com

34. OCTOBER 11-12, 2021
HANDS-ON FLUX TRAINING
October 26-27, 2021
Virtual Experience
We look forward to bringing together our community
of developers to learn, interact and share tips and use
cases.
https://www.influxdays.com/influxdays-north-america-2021-virtual-experience/

35. QUESTIONS?