Cloud computing has been in the news this week for all the right reasons.
Ireland’s Local Government Computer Services Board (LGCSB) are reported to be working with Microsoft on a Cloud Based application to provide a unified map of planning applications, hitherto only available on a County basis via a patchwork quilt of different portals, web sites and web applications.
Given the cold water recently poured by the Chief State Solicitor’s Office on the applicability of Cloud Computing in the Public Sector it’s refreshing to see the LGCSB innovating in this respect. It’s also great that this innovation is occurring in the realm of GIS.
Cloud Computing has a number of well documented characteristics, these from a presentation by Jo Drumgoole at the Cloud Computing Summit in Dublin last year;
- Virtualised infrastructure
- Pay as you use billing
- Unbounded access to resources
- Scale up as easily as you scale down
These characteristics make Cloud Computing very attractive for lots of businesses. But what do they mean for the GIS Community? Well, I think Cloud Computing offers a number of inherent advantages for the deployment of GIS.
- GIS is inherently compute intensive, or at least it is if you are doing any geo-processing. The ability, offered by a Cloud Computing platform to scale out across multiple CPU’s on demand is very attractive.
- GIS is inherently data intensive, especially if you are using cached data. The availability of massive amounts of Cloud based storage to store your caches is a real opportunity. You can cache lots of data, different maps, different projections, large image collections, historic map collections and much more.
- GIS applications, especially on the web, tend to have peaky demand profiles. You publish you web application for the world to see and the danger is the world comes to look and that 4 core server you installed isn’t up to the job. Elastic computing capability in the cloud is a neat way to overcome this problem.
- GIS applications can be bandwidth intensive. Cloud computing centers have massive internet pipes, they can get your tiles from server to user much quicker than most ISP’s.
- GIS applications can be essential but maybe not popular. Sometimes we have to build web applications for compliance purposes – think INSPIRE, or Water Framework Directive or even Local Authority planning registers, but you know what? They don’t get all that many hits. The multi-tenancy concept behind Cloud Computing means that you share your GIS server infrastructure across multiple applications.
All of these things make Cloud Computing just too good an opportunity to ignore. So were not ignoring it, were using it.
At ESRI Ireland we re-engineered our highly popular www.nimap.net site for the Northern Ireland Civil Service onto an ArcGIS Server instance hosted on Amazon Web Services with cached basemapNI Online services for both maps and ortho-photos.
It’s been live without service interruption since last September. It’s been a huge success, hundreds of users, hundreds of thousands of hits and a massive performance gain over its earlier version which we hosted ourselves.
And our guilty little secret? Because ArcGIS Server performs so well with optomised cache services we’ve been running it on an Amazon EC2 Small Instance. You can find out how much that costs us here…
Not too bad, I think you’ll agree?
