Geocloud Blue Raster Web Mapping Cloud Deployment - Lessons from the Field 2010-09-21

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

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

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

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

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.

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

How we did it- Hybrid Solution
ESRI
ArcGISServer -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

Load Estimation

Registrations

UDSmapper.org

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Geocloud Blue Raster Web Mapping Cloud Deployment - Lessons from the Field 2010-09-21

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Geocloud Blue Raster Web Mapping Cloud Deployment - Lessons from the Field 2010-09-21 — Presentation Transcript