1. Web Mapping
Cloud Deployment-
Lessons from the Field
Presented by:
Michael Lippmann
Blue Raster
Applications Moving
to the Cloud
Location Intelligence
GeoCloud 2010
September 22, 2010

2. Challenge- Develop/Deploy in 30 days
Client
 Health and Human Services - HRSA
Need
 Health Care Reform 2010
 Presidential initiative
 Double the number of Community Health Centers
nationally from 1200 to 2400
 90 day window to submit grants for a pool of >$1B

3. Web Mapping Requirement
 Deploy a web mapping application to assist with
grant process
 Non-negotiable - System must be online when grant
period opens
 Week 1- significant utilization
 Middle Weeks- use, but not at peak
 Approaching deadline- last minute use spike

4. Requirements
High availability application
 Downtime not an option-Redundancy
High Performance
 Subsecond performance for maps
Capacity
 Grant applicants will depend on system
 $1B+ being applied for

5. Why we went “Cloud”- Perishable App
• Ability to scale to immediately- Day 1
• Ability to deploy 5 load balanced map servers for
peak demand
• Managed services for scaling based on use
• Lower demand = turn servers off
• ESRI Cloud allowed peak use for short period of
time
• On Day 90- system may be turned off.

6. Old Way, Cloud Way
Old Cloudy – Web Mapping
• 5x Servers • 10x Servers
• order, setup, deploy, • Deploy – right click, wait 5
maintain minutes
• 168 Hours x $6/hr = ~$1000
• 5x Licenses
• Peak -$1000/week
• $300k capital
• Non-peak – $250/week
• After 90 days not needed! • $30k for grant period
• Bottom line- allows for scale
up/down with much lower
capital outlay

7. How we did it- Hybrid Solution
ESRI
 ArcGIS Server -Cloud Infrastructure
Amazon
 EC2
 ESRI ArcGIS Server for web mapping
 S3/CloudFront
 Map tile cache hosting
Hosting.com
 vCloud hosting (using VMware)
 Adobe ColdFusion
 Microsoft SQL Server

9. Load Estimation

10. Registrations

11. UDSmapper.org

13. What we Learned-
Moving tiles into the cloud-
• Trying to upload 45 Million map tiles = #FAIL
• Simply copying that many files takes >1 day
• Load with Amazon Import/Export
 Use fastest HD you can find- WD 10k SATA
 Took 20 hours to load files
 Within 48 hours files are online and ready to use
• Manage with CloudBerry
 Change permissions/setup CloudFront

14. Hybrid Choices
Hosting.com Managed Services- Windows 2008 R2
 Servers online is not as immediate as Amazon- but
you have a person to call
 Machines setup and has 24/7/365 team to monitor
and assist as needed
 Both flavors of Cloud are important in the future.

15. Launch Day- Plan for Anything
• You will have DOWNTIME, need to manage it
• Launch Day- 2 events caused unplanned
downtime
 Amazon S3 Outage- extremely rare but it happens
 Datacenter – Cisco switch failure

16. Health Check your Site
Setup tools to watch all of your servers
 Recommend Pingdom- found it when Twitter had an
outage
 SAAS Monitoring service
 Uses global array of servers to test and notify of
issues

19. Amazon Health Check
http://status.aws.amazon.com/

20. If we did it again… we might:
Use even more Amazon S3/CloudFront to cache
repeatable operations
 Geometry request for boundaries-
states/counties/HPSA
 Gzip/cache speeds load
 Cache directly in Amazon- avoid transfer
 CloudFront- now has immediate expiration

21. Risks of Cloud
• Amazon is great…but many cannot handle
unknown risk of elastic pricing
• Need team that can administer
• Technical saavy – new paradigm
• Changes rapidly – must keep up

22. Conclusions/Questions
• Deployment was successful, next one will be
easier and better
• Cloud for web mapping cannot be ignored
• Hybrid solutions work very well
• Focus on your business requirements, outsource
all of the rest
• Simple is always best

23. For more information:
Michael Lippmann
mlippmann@blueraster.com
703-875-0914
www.blueraster.com
blog.blueraster.com
@blueraster