VDS slice
VDS slice is a web API for accessing seismic slices and fences from VDS files. It also serves basic metadata from the Survey.
Motivation
This API exist in order to reduce the amount of compute- and network-resources needed by a caller in order to fetch a single slice or fences from VDS data. Requesting this data directly through the OpenVDS SDK involves downloading and extracting much more data than asked for. In many scenarios that is completely fine, but there are cases where that extra resource use is unacceptable. Suppose you run a service that caters requests from hundreds of users and as part of each request you have to fetch a slice. Then the resource overhead of OpenVDS will quickly saturate your servers CPU and network throughput, leaving few resource for the rest of you request pipeline.
With this API we move the resource use of OpenVDS away from your server, by serving you exactly the data you ask for and nothing more, keeping each request as lightweight as possible.
Should I use VDS Slice or the OpenVDS SDK?
This API does not serve you any data that cannot be access directly through the OpenVDS SDK. As mentioned, the motivation for VDS Slice is to reduce resource use when fetching small amounts of data, such as slices or fences. However, if your use-case involve reading larger amounts of data, such as in a ML pipeline or other seismic processing you are better of using OpenVDS directly.
Development
CI
E2E tests use secrets to access Azure environment and due to security reasons secrets are not accessible in pull requests. Thus e2e tests can't run on PRs, but are set up to run on merge to master.
If one wants to run e2e tests oneself, one must set up own fork with required secrets to dedicated test storage account. Then e2e tests run can be triggered either manually or by pushing code to a dedicated e2e_tests branch.