With the advent of the massive deluge in Earth data, serving them to diversecommunities is increasingly promising and challenging alike. A usefulabstraction for spatio-temporal raster data (and beyond) is the coverage datamodel, as standardized by ISO, OGC, and INSPIRE. Rather than zillions ofindividual image files it provides spatio-temporal "datacubes" for simple,efficient handling through the corresponding service model, the Web CoverageService (WCS) with its Web Coverage Processing Service (WCPS) geo analyticslanguage - "one cube tells more than a million images". Open-source rasdaman ("raster data manager") is the official referenceimplementation of both OGC and INSPIRE WCS. It supports easy incrementalconstruction and maintenance of spatio-temporal datacubes, based on the OGCWCS-T standard. Retrieval may use WMS for visual navigation, WCS for dataextraction and download, and WCPS for massive server-side processing. Onserver side, adaptive data partitioning and "tile streaming" processingenables fast query responses. In July 2016, US magazine CIO Review hasincluded rasdaman in its top 100 Big Data technologies list. In this talk we present coverages in terms of concepts, implementation, andlarge-scale application. Live demos underpin the talk, using publiclyaccessible sites where the audience can replay and modify the examples. Beingeditor of the OGC and ISO coverage standard the presenter can give first-handsinsights and answers, such as about the new generalized grid model forcoverages (CIS 1.1) which OGC has adopted in Fall 2016 as well as the newlyadopted INSPIRE-WCS. This is an excellent opportunity to learn about the stateof the art and standards in an open, free-of-cost setup.