ISS Location Tracker

This small project consists of an ETL processor and pipeline that obtains the International Space Station's location in real-time using the ISS Open API. The processor writes historical positional data in an Amazon RDS Postgres database, and simulates a user who needs visualisation capabilities as a use case.

Architecture Overview

• Data ingestion: AWS Lambda function executes a containerised Python ETL script every 5 minutes.
• Storage: Amazon RDS Postgres instance for historial data storage.
• Orchestration: Amazon EventBridge for scheduling the Lambda function calls.
• Container registry: AWS Elastic Container Registry (ECR).
• Data visualisation: to be determined.

Prerequisites

• AWS account with appropriate IAM permissions
• Docker installed on local environment
• Python 3.8+
• Local Postgres client for testing and local development
• AWS CLI configured

Setup and installation

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/bernie-cm/iss-lambda
cd iss-lambda

2. Configure AWS Resources

• Create an RDS Postgres instance.
• Set up an ECR repository.
• Configure appropriate KMS Key Policy.
• Create Lambda function.
• Configure EventBridge schedule.

3. Environment variables

POSTGRES_USER=your_username
POSTGRES_PASSWORD=your_password
POSTGRES_HOST=your_rds_endpoint

Note

Here's a diagram of the system:

4. Build and push Docker image

docker build -t iss-tracker .
aws ecr get-login-password --region region | docker login --username AWS --password-stdin aws_account_id.dkr.ecr.region.amazonaws.com
docker tag iss-tracker:latest aws_account_id.dkr.ecr.region.amazonaws.com/iss-tracker:latest
docker push aws_account_id.dkr.ecr.region.amazonaws.com/iss-tracker:latest

Visualisation output

Project structure

iss-lambda
├── README.md
├── assets
│   ├── ISS API diagram.png
│   ├── ISS_plot.png
│   └── iss_project_banner.png
├── docker-compose.yaml
├── dockerfile
├── main.py
└── plot.py

Database schema

CREATE TABLE iss_locations (
    id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
    timestamp TIMESTAMP,
    latitude DECIMAL(9,6),
    longitude DECIMAL(9,6),
);

API reference

The project uses the ISS Open API:

• Endpoint: http://api.open-notify.org/iss-now.json
• No authentication required
• Rate limit: 1 request per second

Deployment

1. Update environment variables in AWS Lambda.
2. Deploye Docker image to ECR.
3. Configure EventBridge to use a schedule rule.
4. Test the pipeline.

Contributing

1. Fork the repository.
2. Create feature branch.
3. Submit pull request.