The Met Office has launched its latest app on its new hybrid cloud platform, Weather Cloud, in an effort to increase the speed of delivery and accuracy of its weather data to customers.

The platform itself enables the company to processes meteorological data for mobile, at scale, across all Met Office platforms, to ensure the team can deliver information to the public at times of extreme weather events. In designing the app, the team took a DevOps orientated approach, releasing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in the first instance, while monitoring customer feedback to refine the proposition.

“We know that more and more people are choosing mobile devices to access their weather information from the Met Office and it’s vital we continue to address this changing behaviour so we can deliver our world-class weather service,” said Owen Tribe, Head of Digital at the Met Office. “The new app technology will enable us to evolve our digital presence and the ways in which people want to access their weather information in the future.”

During Storm Katie in March, the Met Office received a 200% increase in traffic and with over 8 million visits over the course of the weekend. The team claim the new Weather Cloud platform will better enable them to deal with increased traffic and facilitate better planning for short-term weather events. The company also highlighted the ability to scale down in times of lesser demand to reduce public funds spent on the platform.

Weather Cloud was implemented in AWS with assistance from CloudReach, though the DevOps journey has been maintained as the team continue to make updates to the app based on customer feedback.

“The Met Office now has AWS Cloud infrastructure supporting its services, which can respond to changes in demand quickly, is highly resilient in case of any failures and supports stringent security requirements,” said James Monico, Founder at CloudReach. “Using AWS means that the Met Office does not have to maintain hardware that would otherwise be unused for large parts of the year, but it can instead add and remove resources quickly and dynamically as demand fluctuates.”