Automation

Turn EO operations into reliable, repeatable workflows from tasking to delivery.

What Automation Covers

Automation defines orchestration, event handling, approvals, reprocessing, and customer-facing automation interfaces across EO workflows.

Why Automation Matters

Manual orchestration slows delivery and increases errors. Mature automation improves speed, consistency, and operator capacity.

What Good Looks Like

A mature platform supports end-to-end tasking-to-delivery automation with stateful workflow execution, idempotent retries, exception routing, and auditable human approvals for sensitive actions.

Minimum Requirements

Event-driven triggers for ingestion, processing, and delivery stages.
State persistence and replay support for long-running workflows.
Retry and idempotency policies with dead-letter queues.
Exception handling with safe rollback behaviour.
Customer automation via APIs, webhooks, and SDK/CLI options.

Workflow Orchestration

Trigger Sources

Use tasking updates, ingestion completion events, schedules, and operator actions.

Stateful Workflow Execution

Persist workflow state transitions for traceability and re-runs.

Retries and Idempotency

Ensure repeat-safe operations with bounded retries and duplicate suppression.

Branching and Conditional Logic

Route logic by sensor, customer SLA, and policy controls.

Re-runs and Replay

Allow selective replay of failed or outdated processing stages.

Scheduling vs Event Triggers

Use schedules for predictable jobs and events for low-latency responses.

Event-Driven Processing

Implement queue-backed event pipelines with visibility into backlog age, throughput, and stuck states.

Human-in-the-Loop Controls

Introduce approval gates for high-risk jobs such as restricted-area delivery, high-cost reprocessing, or policy exceptions.

Failure Handling and Recovery

Include DLQ triage, rollback/compensation steps, and manual override procedures for blocked automations.

Customer Automation Interfaces

APIs

Stable endpoints for ordering, tracking, and retrieval.

Webhooks

Signed callbacks with retries and delivery status.

SDKs

Reference SDKs for common customer stacks.

CLI Support

Operator-friendly command automation for batch runs.

Sample Integrations

Templates for SIEM, GIS, and alerting-system ingestion.

Automation Decisions

Key choices include batch vs near-real-time workflows, orchestration engine selection, and approval escalation policy.

Metrics and Health Signals

Tasking-to-delivery cycle time.
Workflow success rate and replay frequency.
DLQ volume and mean time to recovery.
Automation observability coverage (logs/metrics/traces).
Manual intervention rate by workflow class.

Anti-Patterns

Manual scripts with no state history.
Retries without idempotency protection.
No approval checkpoints for high-impact actions.
Customer automation limited to polling-only models.

Implementation Checklist

Is ownership clear?
Are minimum controls defined?
Are failure modes addressed?
Are measurable health signals defined?
Are anti-patterns named?
Are dependencies on other domains explicit?
Is there at least one EO-specific implementation example?
Is there a practical implementation checklist?

Example EO Patterns

Tasking acceptance triggers ingestion reservation, preprocessing, and delivery notification automatically.
Cloud cover threshold breach triggers alternate sensor acquisition workflow.
Customer webhook receives signed job-state events with replayable history.

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