ESRI Unveils ArcGIS Server 10 On Amazon

With ArcGIS 10 being released and the kick of the ESRI International User Conference 2010, ESRI has made ArcGIS Server 10 available to customers via Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud .

“ArcGIS Server on Amazon EC2 gives customers another option for deploying ArcGIS Server," explains Ismael Chivite, product manager for ArcGIS Server. "Essentially, ArcGIS Server on Amazon EC2 will reduce the complexity of software deployments for many organizations. Instead of installing and maintaining local instances of ArcGIS Server on premises, customers can launch ArcGIS Server on EC2 instances with ArcGIS Server preconfigured for them. These ArcGIS Server instances run on machines hosted in the Amazon cloud infrastructure but can be administered as if they are local servers."

The relationship with Amazon Web Services was announced earlier this year at the ESRI Federal User Conference 2010. Teaming up with Amazon Web Services, ESRI has been able to extend the ArcGIS System to the cloud. The elastic nature of Amazon EC2 provides an ideal environment for scaling ArcGIS Server 10 to support a particular task.

With an Esri enterprise license agreement (ELA), customers can take advantage of Amazon’s elastic computing infrastructure and deploy unlimited ArcGIS Server instances to handle peak load situations and scale back as demand dissipates.

ESRI has worked to optimise and certify ArcGIS Server 10 for Amazon EC2. This is now a fully supported environment which includes:

• Virtual image of GIS services, which include ArcGIS Server, SQL Server Express, and ArcGIS Desktop software
• ArcGIS Enterprise Geodatabase—A virtual image of an enterprise geodatabase running on PostgreSQL
• Esri technical support including best practice documentation and tutorials

I have been working with Amazon EC2 and ArcGIS Server 10 for a while now. The advantages are great. The Amazon AMI’s created by ESRI allow you to rapidly deploy ArcGIS Server instances with minimal effort. Once requirements are met, these instances can be thrown away.

A press release covering this unveiling can be found here: http://www.esri.com/news/… with full information on the Amazon relationship and ArcGIS Server 10 in the cloud here: http://www.esri.com/partners/…

For those in New Zealand wanting information on ArcGIS Server 10 running in the cloud, please contact us. We have been working heavily with ESRI and a number of customers on this new and exciting platform.