Initially called GRaaS (GRASS as a Service), actinia has been developed to exploit GRASS GIS functionality via HTTPS REST API. GRASS locations, mapsets, vector and raster data as well as spatio-temporal data are available as resources to allow their management and visualization. With the existing (e.g. Landsat) and also recently emerging (Copernicus Sentinel) big geodata pools which are growing day by day, it is designed to follow the purpose of bringing algorithm to cloud geodata. It helps to prepare, analyse and provide a large amount of geoinformation without the need to have know-how of the data, of analysis, appropriate software (for automatisation) or scalable hardware resources.
Some of the features are persistent and ephemeral processing, user management to limit e.g. pixels, processes and duration of calculations as well as logging of API calls and used resources by each user. Another advantage is its easy deployment with docker. When deployed in a cloud based environment with OpenShift or docker-swarm, the integrated load balancer handles a cluster automatically.

Following the spirit of free and open software, we are proud to have emerged as an OSGeo community project and look forward to enlarge the actinia community.