Met Éireann, Future-proofing Ireland's weather services through AWS Cloud Migration

The brief

Met Éireann is one of Ireland’s most critical public services, providing 24/7/365 weather information, aviation data, and life-saving marine warnings.

As extreme weather events grow more frequent, the organisation faced the challenge of a legacy infrastructure that had reached its end of life. To maintain its standing as a world-class meteorological service, Met Éireann needed to migrate its vast data repositories and complex forecasting applications to a more flexible, geo-resilient, and scalable environment.

The goal

The primary objective was to transition Met Éireann from traditional physical hosting to a modern, cloud-first architecture on Amazon Web Services.

• 100% availability, weather services must remain operational during the most severe storms, when web traffic spikes to millions of concurrent users.
• Enhanced scalability. A system that scales compute power automatically, based on real-time processing demands and public need.
• Geo-resilience. National data protected through a multi-region, disaster-recovery-ready infrastructure.
• DevOps agility. A more responsive approach to delivering application upgrades and automated real-time alerts.

The solution

• Cloud infrastructure, AWS services (EC2, S3, RDS) replaced ageing hardware across government data centres with a virtualised, auto-healing environment.
• API-first architecture. A unified API backend now powers both the high-traffic Met.ie website and its mobile applications, ensuring full data consistency across all platforms.
• Real-time integration. The new infrastructure was integrated with the National Weather Warning System, enabling the seamless delivery of targeted alerts to city councils, emergency services, and the public.
• Data modernisation. Decades of climate records and minute-by-minute sensor data from Automatic Weather Stations were transitioned into a cloud-native data lake for faster analysis.

The outcome

The migration has successfully transformed Met Éireann into a digitally agile organisation, better equipped for the demands of modern meteorology and public safety.

Weather models now update every hour rather than every three, mobile users enjoy a redesigned experience, and sub-county polygon alerts reach communities with far greater precision. The platform handles massive traffic surges during Red weather warnings without degradation, ensuring that critical safety information is always accessible when it is needed most.