Multi-Regional Geospatial ML Infrastructure
Built multi-region GPU inference and 1TB+/day ETL pipelines for satellite imagery at Pixxel, which improved inference efficiency by 75% and cut map-rendering latency in half.
- Processed daily
- 1TB+
- Inference-efficiency improvement
- 75%
- Lower map-rendering latency
- 50%
Confidentiality note. Internal service names, proprietary scientific details, and employer-specific implementations are kept general here. Every scale figure, responsibility, technology, and outcome below comes from already-published facts in Sudhanva’s résumé and public profile.
Problem
Pixxel’s satellite pipeline ingested over 1 TB of hyperspectral imagery a day across multiple regions and served map tiles to users. Running every job through a single central GPU queue wasted cross-region bandwidth, slowed down map rendering, and broke whenever upstream metadata schemas changed.
Scale and constraints
Scale
- 1TB+ of satellite imagery and geospatial data processed daily across ETL and ML pipelines.
- Multi-region cloud deployment placing GPU inference in the same regions as ingested imagery.
- Distributed GPU job queue with automated regional A/B model evaluation.
Constraints
- Route imagery to the matching regional model and GPU pool automatically.
- Reduce map-rendering latency and cloud transfer costs without dropping model accuracy.
- Catch upstream metadata and schema changes before they break daily ingestion and inference runs.
Sudhanva’s ownership
Sudhanva designed the multi-region ML infrastructure, built the daily ETL and inference pipelines, and wrote the distributed GPU job scheduler.
- Multi-region cloud and GPU inference setup.
- Daily geospatial ETL and ML data pipelines.
- Distributed GPU queue and automated A/B model selection per region.
Architecture at a safe level
Internal service names and proprietary scientific details are omitted below, while the data flow, orchestration, and operational setup reflect the production system.
- Deployed autoscaling GPU workers in the cloud regions where satellite downlinks landed so terabytes of rasters stayed local during inference.
- Built a distributed GPU job scheduler with automated A/B evaluation that selected the best model for each geographic region.
- Added schema validation at ingestion to reject malformed metadata before GPU jobs started.
Engineering decisions and tradeoffs
- Running inference across multiple cloud regions cut data-transfer time and egress spend, though it required managing deployments across regions in Terraform.
- Tuned GPU queue autoscaling to balance job startup time against spot and on-demand budgets.
Results
- Improved inference efficiency by 75%.
- Reduced map-rendering latency by 50%.
- Reduced pipeline failures caused by schema issues by 30%.
- Saved $500,000 annually in cloud costs.
Reliability and operations
- Ingestion schema checks stopped malformed payloads from crashing jobs mid-run.
- Automated regional A/B routing replaced manual model swaps.
Transferable lessons
- Validating raster metadata and schemas at ingestion caught 30% of pipeline failures before any GPU work started.
- With 1 TB+ of daily satellite imagery, placing GPU workers in the ingestion regions was faster and cheaper than copying rasters to a central cluster.
Technologies
- Geospatial ML
- ETL
- GPU scheduling
- Multi-region cloud infrastructure
- A/B testing
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