ArcGIS Server Running In The Cloud

Last week as part of the ESRI Federal User Conference 2010, ESRI announced a new and existing relationship with Amazon Web Services. Information on this announcement can be found here: http://geo.geek.nz/esri/…

There were a few other notes that those interested should be aware of. Very soon we’ll see ArcGIS Server running in the cloud I think this is a significant development and a great move forward from ESRI.

Initially ESRI will offer ArcGIS Server Enterprise Advanced v10, along with a few extensions, on AWS.

“The ArcGIS Server Amazon Machine Images, hosted in the AWS cloud, will not be made available until the ArcGIS Server v10 release [in July], and only for customers under an ESRI Enterprise License Agreement,” says Victoria Kouyoumjian, IT Strategy Architect at ESRI.

Users who don’t want to wait for the release of v10 can run ArcGIS Server 9.3.1 in the cloud, but that requires retaining ESRI Professional Services to assist in getting it up and running.

From a licensing perspective it’s easy to offer this service to those customers who are part of an Enterprise Licence Agreement. I am sure ESRI are looking at options on how to offer this to customers not part of an ELA. Information will be posted once this is made available.

So this provides organisations on an ELA with a few options when thinking about providing services and data to users. You will now be able to not only host your data but also your ArcGIS Server in the cloud. With Amazon’s great infrastructure this could be very appealing to many organisations.

Are you now thinking about running ArcGIS Server in the cloud?