Abstract

GeoCloud Sandbox Initiative: Geospatial Platform-as-a-Service
Track: Web and Server
Authors: Jonathan Baier, Patrick Grady

The U.S. Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) has sponsored the GeoCloud initiative to coordinate the development, certification, and deployment of shared geospatial system images by multiple federal agencies. System requirements were solicited from ten projects and two platform images were created to support these requirements in both the open-source and commercial environments. The commercial platform package includes the Windows 2008 Server and ArcGIS Server application suite. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and storage (S3) was selected as the cloud deployment infrastructure. GSA contractors and FGDC staff supported the technical deployment and documentation. The outputs of this initiative are to 1) develop and maintain the PaaS images, 2) work toward common federal-wide 'system' security accreditation, and 3) document the lessons learned and cost models for the range of projects. Results show that the GeoCloud environment provides a cost-effective solution for most federal geospatial applications with a FISMA Low-Moderate security designation.