Abstract

Migrating Department of Education Web Mapping App to AWS EC2
Track: Web and Server
Authors: Tai Phan, Amy Ramsdell, Michael Lippmann

The U.S. Department of Education (ED) participated in the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC)'s GeoCloud Program in 2012. The GeoCloud initiative provides selected agencies an Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosting platform to on-ramp their geospatial applications. ED migrated its on-premises ArcGIS for Server for the School District Demographic Data System (SDDS) Map Viewer (http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sdds) to Amazon EC2. SDDS is publicly available and allows access to information about demographics, social characteristics, and economics of children and school districts from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Using GeoCloud, ED gained experience with cloud-based Windows 2008R2 Server and ESRI ArcGIS for Server 10.1 platform. It has been almost one year now and we will reflect on various lessons learned including planning, security/hardening, AWS console, server configuration, reliability, licensing, and backup strategy. We will discuss the current state of our server deployments and future plans for ED in the Cloud.