Abstract

Teaching ArcGIS Server in the Cloud
Track: Education and Training
Authors: Frank Hardisty, Sterling Quinn

We report here on the experience of teaching a course which centered on using ArcGIS Server deployed on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) cloud computing services. We used the NIST (National Institutes of Science and Technology) definition of cloud computing, consisting of five essential characteristics (on-demand self service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, measured service) and three service models (software, platform, and infrastructure as a service). We report on how ArcGIS Server on EC2 maps to the NIST definition, and on the strengths and weaknesses were of learning ArcGIS Server using EC2 instances. We also offer some speculation on how the rise of cloud computing will affect GIS in coming years.