Geospatial Cloud Computing
Agency Panel, ESIP
Doug Nebert
USGS Federal Geographic Data Committee
Agency view
1)
What is your agency's view in regard to Cloud
Computing?
2)
What is your agency's near term plan for Cloud?
3)
What is your agency's position with regard to public,
private, and hybrid Cloud?
4)
Is your agency working with any public cloud
provider(s)? Any feedback on the quality of their service?
5)
What is your Big Data problem? Can cloud be the
solution?
6)
What are the fundamental, designing, implementation,
application, and policy/social issues for cloud computing?
7)
What are our best practices and lessons learned?
8)
What are the long term strategies?
2
Agency view of Cloud
FGDC is coordinating the GeoCloud
Sandbox as incubator for agency
geospatial Web services Platforms
Commercial and private Cloud solutions
are appropriate and economical for
geospatial services and applications
Hybrid solutions already in effect at
USGS (Streamstats, National Map)
3
Near-term Plan
The Geospatial Platform will be hosted
for the near-term in AWS with back-end
links to Esri AGOL SaaS for map
composition and rendering
FGDC will continue to support GeoCloud
as incubator and offer fee-for-service
hosting for national geospatial data
assets in secure Cloud infrastructure
4
Public Cloud Collaboration
FGDC is contracting for services with
Amazon Web Services (AWS) for
Geospatial Platform website hosting and
for hosting of select agency assets
Will exploit the pending DOI IT/Cloud
services contract vehicle, when
available for future Cloud servics
5
BigData
The FGDC Secretariat holds no data, but
FGDC Committee Members do – data must be
provided by high-availability services
3+ million Landsat images
The National Map vector and raster sources
National Wetlands Inventory
Census TIGER (TIGER-File, TIGERWeb)
Public and private Web solutions in-force
6
Fundamental Issues
Culture change


With few exceptions, the agency CIO
approval of Cloud IaaS has been difficult as
the mentality is to secure ‘systems’ not
clones of ‘solution architectures’
Factoring and reconsidering bandwidth,
firewall, VPN, and data management
policies with an external Cloud offering
7
Best Practices
The GeoCloud effort has posted a
number of project reports for 2011 that
will help agencies understand the costs
and benefits of Cloud to geospatial
applications

http://www.fgdc.gov/initiatives/geoplatform/geocloud
Planning a white paper to help
accelerate Cloud deployment for federal
agencies
8
Long-Term Strategies
Majority of agency geospatial services
will be hosted on security-certified
Cloud platform
Geoprocessing functions (models and
transformations) will be performed in
the Cloud to support more than just
visual analysis of geospatial data
9