HPC in the Cloud: GIS Applications Take to the Clouds

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July 20, 2010

GIS Applications Take to the Clouds

Nicole Hemsoth

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Geographic Information Systems (GIS) applications have been moving into the cloud with increased momentum but like other fields where software drives the business model, the move from complex software to the software as a service cloud model was slow to catch on due to the business of delivering software—not the technological constraints of doing so. This presents a new market for those previously locked out of GIS due to high startup costs and a potential paradigm shift for how this niche segment of the software industry does business from now on. The GIS example is representative not only of how large-scale application areas are tentatively approaching the cloud from a technological and business model standpoint, but how such shifts can begin to have an instant impact on the new user groups enabled by the delivery model.

The diverse field of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has seen greater demand for its wide array of geospatial technologies, not only because the mainstream internet has allowed for a much richer, more inclusive way to map just about anything that is a noun via a sort of unconscious crowd-sourcing of metadata and geotagging, but because the applications for such data are growing. GIS technologies have traditionally been used in predictable ways in the forestry, civil engineering and development areas, as well as in natural resource exploration and the culling of general population data for use by agencies and organizations of all sizes and purposes. As mapping has become more detailed and the underlying technology behind it more powerful, GIS has been increasingly used in marketing and consumer trend identification—and you can let your imagination take you from there.

Technologically speaking, GIS is continually evolving at the same rapid pace that the internet and satellite imaging technologies are, although the business model for GIS has, until very recently, remained the same. Over the last few months there has been an increasing amount of news from the GIS community as it begins to adapt to the arrival of software as a service (SaaS) model. Major players in the industry like Esri are taking a proactive approach by making highly publicized partnerships with cloud vendors and cloud-enabled supercomputing sites like Rocky Mountain Supercomputing Centers.

Unlike some other areas, GIS has not taken off to the clouds until recently because of what appears to be business concerns versus those revolving around application functionality. Many common GIS applications will function in public cloud environments like EC2 and Microsoft Azure but there were a relatively small handful of GIS software companies, all of whom had been carrying along just fine on their traditional mode of software delivery. It was not until Esri, who just happens to be one of the biggest players in the GIS software industry, took the first highly publicized step to the cloud to make their technology available via an SaaS model. While this is not to say that some of the large-scale GIS applications won’t experience the typical performance hitch so common for other HPC-type applications in a cloud like EC2 or Azure, this is a tight software industry that has hitherto been resistant to change—and who can blame them, at least from a business standpoint?

As one might imagine, this has traditional GIS software companies up in arms—the model of GIS software delivery is changing and it is becoming clear to many that they either need to catch up with the times and make bold moves like Esri did (they are the big newsmakers on the GIS front in terms of shifting to the SaaS model)

On the user side, however, the move for GIS applications in the cloud and delivered via an SaaS model holds great potential, especially for those who found the barriers for entry to GIS too high in terms of costs to license and then to actually have the compute thrust to run such applications.

But, when it comes to the traditional delivery model of GIS software, the times they are a' changin'...

GIS on Microsoft’s Azure Cloud

Microsoft Azure seems to be among the favored platforms when it comes to GIS applications in the cloud, particularly for applications with less hefty requirements than what is being crunched at Rocky Mountain Supercomputing Centers in the course of their partnership with GIS software maker Esri. Take for example Microsoft’s case study of GIS software company Esri and its MapIt software that they thought might best empower users if delivered as a service.

Esri has been providing software for GIS since 1969 and is among the leaders in the space, providing its handiwork for government, industry and academia across roughly 300,000 organizations. It recently partnered with Microsoft to expand “the reach of its GIS technology by offering a lightweight solution called MapIt that combines the software plus services to provide spatial analysis and visualization tools to users unfamiliar with GIS. Esri began offering MapIt as a cloud service with the Windows Azure platform” and customers are now able to deploy the software on Azure to store their information in the Microsoft SQL database. As Microsoft reports in its detailed case study of taking GIS to the cloud on Azure, “By lowering the cost and complexity of deploying GIS, Esri is reaching new markets and providing new and enhanced services to its existing customers.”

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