00:01Thanks for attending this afternoon.

00:02What we're going to talk about is a business perspective on deploying into the Amazon infrastructure.

00:10Myself, my name is Andrew Hendrickson. I'm a solution architect within our corporate sales management division.

00:15I'm going to be copresenting with Marwa Mabrouk from our service implementation services division, correct?

00:21And so, I will pick up and start the conversation today in discussing, you know, is the Amazon cloud right for your GIS?

00:31And I'll talk about a lot of different things from a business angle, but we'll also...

00:36...dive a little bit in and talk about architecture as well.

00:39So I think it'll be necessary to talk a little bit about patterns and practices as well.

00:44We'll talk about business cases for using the Amazon cloud.

00:48Within that, we'll kind of focus on elasticity and time to market...

00:51...as well as risk aversion and budgetary reasons for utilizing the Amazon infrastructure.

00:57We'll talk about ArcGIS 10 a little bit and we'll float a little bit back and forth and talk about some technical...

01:04...we'll deep dive a little bit for some of the deployment options that I'll discuss.

01:10And then we'll wrap up talking about some services that we have to help get you started.

01:19So with ArcGIS 10 we see a change.

01:24You know, we see a cloud-ready system that out of the box supports the ability to have...

01:30...both an on-premise server as well as a hosted server.

01:34In addition to our desktop, mobile, and rich Internet clients, we now have the ability to have multiple, or I should say...

01:40...sort of a hybrid approach to architecting a solution to satisfy your business needs.

01:47So what becomes important now is to start to talk about, how does GIS fit into your IT enterprise?

01:54What is the governance around the GIS itself? Is GIS part of it?

02:01Is it part of the IT, you know, enterprise plan?

02:06Do we consider it mission critical? Right? 'Cause we've got to start talking about SLAs and service-level agreements...

02:12...when we're talking about including the GIS on infrastructure that you do not necessarily own.

02:21So in a sense, are you in or out of the IT governance?

02:25So what this slide attempts to describe, is cloud an option for your GIS?

02:30In the left column I have listed as tiers, and I've just sort of named them, randomly as...

02:37...SLA 1 through SLA 3, meaning service-level agreement again.

02:42Let me define service-level agreement.

02:43What I’m talking about is what is the required uptime...

02:46...or expectations of that system match with your business workflow needs?

02:52So the way I've laid this out is, in the second column it says Uptime.

02:56What is the expected uptime of a particular application or technical workflow?

03:01Is there five nines? Is there four nines? Is there three nines?

03:03This is what I’m really getting at in terms of uptime. So 99.999 percent uptime.

03:09Does anybody have that type of uptime with their GIS today? Okay, couple, right?

03:14Let's move down a little bit and talk about 95 percent uptime...

03:17...which basically means you get about 18 days a year that you can be down.

03:20Does that sound more realistic for the GIS domain?

03:24This is something that we need to begin to consider because the type of infrastructure that you will use to support it...

03:30...will either enable you or disable you from doing that.

03:33So let's go from left to right on SLA 1.

03:37SLA 1, the uptime there required, 99.99 percent. 999 percent, which gives you 5.25 minutes of downtime a year.

03:48Some folks are laughing, which translates into 25.9 seconds a month...which translate into about 6 seconds a week.

03:58So this is a...this is a sample, by the way.

04:02This is just how I want to start to get you thinking.

04:04On the right-hand side I have listed under Infrastructure, On Premise.

04:09Why do I have listed On Premise?

04:10Because there may be the inability for a cloud vendor to support that type of uptime, depending upon what you choose to use.

04:19But you need to be aware of this ahead of architecting a solution and including the cloud in your potential conceptual architecture.

04:28Number two, the second column there, SLA 2. Uptime requirement, 95 percent.

04:33Well that gives you about 18 days a year that you can be down, or 36 hours a month, about 8 hours a week.

04:39Down meaning not available to the rest of your business.

04:42The infrastructure I've listed here is a combination or a hybrid of on-premise and cloud...

04:48...where we're able to mix and match the SLAs

04:51...on the particular pieces of infrastructure to match your business needs.

04:57SLA 3, 90 percent required uptime. 365 days a year.

05:02Again, I'm recommending in the third column the same type of architectural pattern for deployment to meet those needs.

05:10So the takeaway from this slide is, we need to begin to think about the GIS the same way...

05:14...we think about other critical mission, or mission-critical systems.

05:19A good way to do this is to start thinking about the technology as it falls into deployment patterns, or patterns of usage.

05:30So over the past few years, we've been working a lot with large clients and small clients alike...

05:35...and we've noticed trends in the way folks are deploying Esri technology.

05:39The first pattern that we want to talk about is data management.

05:43So where is the data being managed?

05:45Sometimes this is also referred to as asset management.

05:49But this directly correlates with how you're collecting, organizing, and exchanging your data.

05:53 collect once, reuse many times.

05:56So from a technology perspective this correlates with our geodatabase, our geodatabase information model.

06:03Moving to the right, Planning and Analysis.

06:05So here's where we're able to take information out of that place where we're storing it...

06:09...and transform it into actionable information.

06:13We do that how? Contemporarily, we do that with our geoprocessing framework.

06:18There's other ways that it can be done too, but primarily we're talking about geoprocessing.

06:23Further to the right, Field Mobility.

06:24Getting information into and out of the field.

06:28Having a field user be able to actually alter attributes in the geodatabase...

06:33...or change features and submit them back in real time.

06:37The fourth pattern, Operational Awareness.

06:40Here's where we're able to take information and make it available to the rest of the business...

06:43...whether it be via a web map, or a mashup, right? But this correlates with our web API technology.

06:51Why do I like using these patterns when I'm talking about the cloud as well?

06:54Because the technology performs differently, depending upon which pattern of usage you're using.

07:02So it's a good way to start thinking about your business process workflows...

07:06...and which ones might be better served in the cloud versus on premises.

07:13So one neat thing that we've seen happen over the past few years is the usage of our web APIs is increasing tremendously.

07:21So it's giving, relevancy to the GIS domain.

07:24The folks that are editing data are actually doing things within the geodatabase editing features, but what do we have?

07:31We have a lot of demand coming from folks who want to see those web maps.

07:35They want to see the GIS data taken out of the domain and mashed up with other types of map services.

07:42Utilizing the Amazon EC2 paradigm, we can very quickly expand out a web mapping application.

07:50And we can also bring it back.

07:51So if we've got peaks and troughs in our usage, we can expand and bring them out...so...and bring them back.

07:57So the concept I wanted to leave you with is let's begin to think about the patterns of usage...

08:01...within your business enterprise as well, before you make a decision as to what way you want to deploy the technology.

08:08Is cloud actually an option for you?

08:16So I thought I'd throw up a little quote, definition, you know. So what is the definition of "elasticity?"

08:21"The tendency of a body to return to its original shape after it has been stretched or compressed."

08:28Is elasticity a reason, by a show of hands, for why a lot of you were curious about utilizing Amazon?

08:35Maybe? Okay.

08:37I challenge that in the future it may be, for you.

08:40I may see more hands in the future.

08:46So I'm going to dig in a little bit on elasticity.

08:49You can adjust for peaks and demands, troughs, for your data management tasks that you're performing today.

08:56So, with our potential deployment options today...

09:01...we see the availability to create high availability with ArcGIS Server in the Amazon cloud...

09:07...as well as the enterprise geodatabase.

09:10We see the availability to actually deploy a highly available infrastructure...

09:18...that you can do updates from out of the cloud, into the cloud.

09:23But let me clarify that, in business, the cloud is almost like you're renting that server hardware, right?

09:28You don't own it. Right? There's implications there too.

09:31So as we think about this from a budgetary perspective, as we think about these deployment patterns...

09:37...think about the implications for your budget as well, right?

09:41Is it hard for folks to provision, hardware?

09:45I have found in my career it could be very difficult to provision hardware...

09:49...because it comes out of a certain style of budget...

09:51...whereas this may not come out of the same style of budget, so I'll come back to that.

09:55Okay, enhanced and dynamic processing.

09:57Large batch processing, geoprocessing large-scale analysis.

10:02Being able to blow out that infrastructure and then bring it back without taking ownership...

10:06...or having to worry about actually provisioning all of that hardware.

10:12Some things we've seen going on already. Cache cooking. Do we like this term of "cache cooking?"

10:18So creating your cache and then moving it around.

10:21Something you have to do not so often, depending upon how often your data changes.

10:26But maybe you want to use some infrastructure that you don't own to actually create it...

10:30...or store it, and then bring it back.

10:35So actually deploying your cache in S3 as well.

10:38And we'll talk about precisely what S3 is and what the price implications are later in the presentation.

10:43Large batch geocoding, or just geocoding in and of itself...

10:47...do you want to support that on your own infrastructure or sort of farm it out?

10:54So the operational awareness pattern, in mobile as well. I kind of lumped these together on this slide.

10:59So growing out capacity as needed. This has been a barrier for many clients in the past.

11:06Or, simply, we didn’t know how many folks were going to be utilizing web maps...

11:12...or mobile capabilities, so we put something out there and said people will come to it.

11:16Well sometimes I say be careful what you're asking for.

11:19Put something out there and then all of a sudden on day two you've got 1,200 people coming at it at the same time, right?

11:24So how do you support that without sinking your infrastructure?

11:28This type of deployment, the Amazon cloud gives you very, very nice options here.

11:34So expanding your capabilities in near real time.

11:38Hopefully some of you were able to attend the earlier session...

11:40...were able to see that it does not take a lot of time to provision a server.

11:45 So one server access with ArcGIS Server, high availability. This is a big deal.

11:52We're going to start to see folks that in the past have not been able to actually deploy in...

11:57...highly available environments, be able to utilize these deployment patterns to do so now...

12:01...which means you can begin to support more mission-critical workflows.

12:07Same thing between the mobile pattern of usage as well as the operational awareness pattern of usage.

12:15So I wanted to throw some pretty simple architectural style diagrams at you today as well.

12:21What we're looking at is a traditional on-premise deployment, where we've got a single user, or a couple users.

12:26I don't mean to denote it's only one person, but basically there's a desktop...

12:30...there's an ArcGIS Server, there's an editing environment on premise.

12:35On premise meaning you own the server. You've got to provision the server, right?

12:39You own it, right? You've got to administer it.

12:47So this one shows a cloud deployment of the same architectural pattern...

12:52...where the user is accessing the same pieces of Esri technology...

12:58...but now they don't own that physical piece of hardware anymore.

13:01It's actually on Amazon's infrastructure.

13:04The desktop can still exist there. ArcGIS Server can still exist there and you can do some editing in the cloud.

13:11You don't have to own any of it. This is one deployment pattern that we're seeing today.

13:18So expanding that out a little bit, let's talk about actually adding some redundancy to it, right?

13:25So here we've got an on-premise person, I'll just keep referring to it as a single person...

13:31...but on-premise data management and analysis occurring, where you're still managing assets and you're doing geoprocessing.

13:37You're adding value to the data on premise, but you're pushing across and up into the Amazon cloud...

13:44...information that you can serve as a web map.

13:47So you're not coupled to the infrastructure that you have on premise to serve a greater audience in the cloud.

13:56And we can utilize many, many different parts of the Amazon technology platform to manage growing this out.

14:03And we'll talk about that later in the presentation as well.

14:07So this is listed as ArcGIS Server 1 through N.

14:11This is a very, very nice architectural approach as well for decoupling your different environments.

14:17There is an SLA that's different for the operational awareness pattern...

14:21...than it is for your data editing environment in this proposed conceptual architecture. The two are not connected.

14:33In this slide, we're demonstrating a bit of a hybrid, where we've got, an on-premise user.

14:39They may have an actual desktop there or maybe they're just tunneling in to Amazon...

14:46...and accessing ArcGIS Desktop there, with ArcGIS Server there as well.

14:51And we can have the actual infrastructure supporting data management and visualization decoupled as well...

14:58...with them both sitting in the cloud.

15:08We can synchronize between geodatabases in the cloud as well, with multiple ones existing.

15:15This has a lot of implications in terms of being able to support a large amount of users...

15:21...for being able to actually synchronize a highly available geodatabase on Amazon infrastructure.

15:28This has typically been a pain point in the GIS domain for achieving maximum uptime of a redundant geodatabase...

15:36...while trying to support the actual, the physical device itself.

15:42Hope this is becoming clear how it's playing out.

15:44There is a bit of...a degree of separation that we want to have for the types of patterns that you're using the software...

15:51...and we want to correlate those with how you're deploying it.

15:53We want to see you correlate it with how you're deploying it.

16:02So in this one, you know we've got a publication instance actually in the cloud, editing actually going on on-premise...

16:07...and we're synchronizing between the two and simply creating an active passive pair...

16:13...where we don't require that high level of redundancy between the two databases.

16:20 So again, let me rewind us a little bit and say it's very important for you and us to understand...

16:26...how available the data needs to be to an application or an end user...

16:31...before you choose your type of deployment pattern.

16:35And when does the business say that the data actually needs to be live?

16:43So in this case, you'll notice that the operational awareness pattern...

16:46...which is the one all the way to the right where we're serving web maps, hasn't changed at all.

16:50It's completely different. So they are decoupled even though they're all in the cloud.

16:59With this slide, it's broken down even differently.

17:03Another message I think I should state for you is that there's a lot of different options now...

17:10...and the ArcGIS platform is pervasive across all of it.

17:14So you have the ability to, even if you cannot have because of some sort of IT governance...

17:20...where you're organization does not allow things to exist outside of your data centers...

17:25...or outside of your own owned hardware...

17:28...maybe you might want to just have a development environment that exists on Amazon...

17:32...whereas in the past you didn't have a separate development environment.

17:36You can build a development environment out very quickly and get rid of it when you don't need it.

17:42It's also very good for a QC/QA environment.

17:45This one is demonstrating a completely on-premise deployment, but only with a test environment in the Amazon cloud.

17:54So as you can imagine, there is a myriad of ways that we can mix and match the way that we deploy ArcGIS.

18:04And the way that you utilize data management is also very important.

18:08As Marwa will talk about later, there's implications for the size of data that you're going to be moving around.

18:14So if you don't need to move a certain amount of data from on-premise up, don't.

18:21'Cause it may cost you more money.

18:25We'll come back to a pattern later in the presentation as well.

18:29So time to market. Here's another business reason that I wanted to discuss with you today.

18:34So getting a server provisioned quickly, getting an application up and running quickly.

18:39There's a bigger issue here too, erasing the limits of creativity with the ability to quickly respond to business needs.

18:48We see this with a lot of clients today.

18:52We see this in emergency response, where you quickly have to create an application to respond to some sort of need.

18:59So utilizing the cloud, the Amazon cloud, tremendously, tremendously increases your time to provision hardware.

19:07So rapid provision of ArcGIS Server equals less time to spin up your servers.

19:13They're easy to set up and administer.

19:19You can release a web mapping application extremely quickly, in under an hour.

19:31This completely removes restraints on innovation. Very exciting to me.

19:36It gives you the ability to test different deployment patterns all the while you're doing this, right?

19:41Maybe something isn't working for you...or the organization.

19:47It allows us to be simple as well.

19:49I love staying as close to off-the-shelf software as I can so I can switch between versions, I can upgrade...

19:58...and allows me to scale very quickly, so if I do put something out there quickly and it's not correct...

20:04...I can go back. I can rewind and redo it.

20:13Another concept I want to talk about, risk aversion.

20:16Large organizations, small organizations, any organization is typically going to be risk averse, right?

20:25You know, as you grow technology throughout your business and you meet and serve more needs...

20:31...you should be risk adverse. You shouldn't just be spending a lot of money and dumping it out there.

20:36So we shouldn't have to limit ourselves due to cost ceilings as well.

20:43So as we're building things out and we make a mistake, it's good to be able to bring them back quickly.

20:53So what is the cloud appropriate for?

20:56There's some best practices that we've been talking about today a lot.

21:00I haven't called them out necessarily as best practices but they are.

21:03High availability, redundancy.

21:06What is it appropriate for, you know?

21:08Is it appropriate for your development environment?

21:11Is it appropriate for your staging environment?

21:13Is it appropriate for production?

21:16That depends upon your organization, right?

21:20By being able to do performance and scalability tests ahead of actually releasing things, we limit our risk.

21:26Maybe the cloud isn't reliable enough to meet your needs.

21:31This goes back to that service-level agreement stuff we talked about. Is it secure enough, you know?

21:38One of the main reasons why we see folks considering deployments to the cloud...

21:44...is to maximize CPU utilization across infrastructure, right?

21:49Why do I have this under Limit Risk?

21:52I kind of toyed around with this one for a little while, because I have in the past bought...

21:58...or I should say spent a lot of money on hardware, and then when we went back and evaluated it...

22:02...we weren't actually utilizing as much CPU as we needed to across that hardware.

22:07So when I was reevaluated and I was going back for budget again...

22:10...I had a bit of a problem justifying those big, honkin' machines that I had bought.

22:16Utilizing cloud deployments. We can limit that risk tremendously.

22:21'Cause you can spread things out much differently than you can with that one big honkin' box that I just referred to.

22:27That's what I mean by real utilization of owned property, of owned equipment versus rented.

22:32Again, sort of touching on the concept of budgetary concerns.

22:37Compliance as well. This is interesting.

22:39You're able to comply with certain rules and regulations by being green in terms of computing environments utilizing the cloud.

22:49I'll take questions at the end.

22:52So budget. Growing the GIS into your business enterprise requires unique budgetary planning.

23:02We always need to limit capital expenditures, right?

23:06Especially nowadays. Flexible expense budgets can be used. What do I mean there?

23:11Can you use your expense budget for purchasing hardware?

23:16Ah! But are you purchasing hardware in the Amazon cloud or are you purchasing a service?

23:22You might be able to utilize different budgets to grow out capabilities within your enterprise.

23:29So reducing operational costs as well. No heavy lifting. This is interesting. I simply mean no heavy lifting.

23:35You're not loading servers into racks. You're not worrying about power, space...

23:38...air conditioning, you know, any of this sort of stuff.

23:41Somebody else is dealing with that. That's built in to the cost of the actual service itself.

23:46And again, this time-to-market effect is very important.

23:50So literal cost and practice. We're going to talk about the literal cost and practice.

23:58We're going to talk about what an A-M-I is, or an AMI.

24:01We're going to talk about the cost of use for very specific scenarios. This could vary greatly.

24:11And we'll talk a little bit about billing and how it works as well.

24:15So I think at this point I'll turn it over for a couple of minutes.

24:23You might want to come over here.

24:31Sorry. So this section I'm going to be talking about how to estimate your costs.

24:37Some of the concepts have to do with the actual services that Amazon offers.

24:41We had a session earlier today where we went into those services, explained them in a lot of detail...

24:48...so I’m going to do this a little bit briefly, while also giving you a good idea about what these services can do...

24:56...and then how to understand how you're going to get billed for them.

25:01The...one of the most important concepts about the Amazon cloud is the instance types.

25:07What Amazon does is that they prepackage their computing power and their memory capacity in a preset configuration.

25:17This is maybe...

25:20So, for example, if you want to use a processor dual core versus quad core...

25:26...you can't set this according to what you need at that moment.

25:30You're going to pick out of the list, and that list will contain a predetermined set of capacity configurations...

25:37...and you will go with one of them. And depending on what you choose, you're going to be billed a certain rate per hour.

25:43So I put here the sizes that are typically published by Amazon.

25:47They have been modifying them and they've been known to add to them pretty quickly.

25:52The ones that are out there right now are the category standard, high CPU, and high memory...

25:56...and from the name you can tell what has been the drive for that category.

26:02They want to offer machines that either have more CPU power or more memory capacity.

26:08I've also included a couple of examples.

26:11For the 64 bit, the example I have on the left side includes the smallest machine that they have...

26:16...which is basically around 7 gigabytes of memory and it's a dual core with 4 EC2.

26:25And the way Amazon would do the computing unit, it's extracted to this term called EC2, which is an Amazon capacity...

26:34...and it equates to around 1 gigahertz of speed for the processor.

26:38So their processors will vary depending on the different categories and depending on that number of EC2s.

26:45So in short, this means this is a dual-core machine that has pretty reasonable speed...

26:51...not very fast processor, and it's only got 7 gigabytes of memory. It's 64 bit.

26:57Now on the other high end, they offer other machines that seem to be a little bigger.

27:02So, the high CPU extra large has more emphasis on the CPU power, so the CPU tends to be a little bigger or a little bit faster.

27:12They also don't have that much memory in it.

27:15One of their most recent releases was the high-memory category...

27:20...and they have the largest and it's called quadruple extra large.

27:24They typically kind of rank them as small, medium, large, extra large.

27:28So this is the biggest of all the instances you can get...

27:32...and it's got about 68 gigabytes of memory and what equates to 8 virtual cores.

27:40Now each of these instances, they come with different sizes and they also come with different prices.

27:47I included here another example for the standard type. This is the smallest.

27:51The smallest is around 48 cents an hour and that is what you will be paying if you run that much CPU and that much memory.

28:02It also comes in extra large. The price would be around 96 cents per hour.

28:08This is what's called the standard on-demand.

28:10So this is the pricing if you want to not sign up for something that is long term.

28:15You just want to use it for a number of hours and then you don't want to be paying again...

28:21...and then when you feel like using it, you go back and start some other instance.

28:24If you...if you don't want to do that, if you know you're instance is going to be running all the time.

28:30So for this coming year, I am planning two instances that I'm just going to have running all the time.

28:36Now you can get something similar to like a bulk discount and that's what the reserved instances are for.

28:43You can see you would pay a certain year term that includes an up-front cost...

28:47...but after that the usage rate per hour goes considerably low. It can go to savings up to 30 percent...

28:55...so what most people would do is that for the instances they know they're going be running all the time, they will use the reserve.

29:02And then for the other instances that they would like to use the elasticity model for, they would use the on demand.

29:08So that's how this model really works.

29:11And you can see considerable cost savings when you take into account how the reserve will be used and how the on demand.

29:22So to run an actual machine, if you want to compare a machine in the cloud to having it on premise...

29:29...what are the costs to running a machine in the cloud?

29:32A lot of folks go to the Amazon website and they're not really sure how to figure out...

29:37...which service is what and how things work out.

29:40As we just walked through the computing power in terms of CPU, and the memory has it's own hourly rate.

29:47There's also the rates that are related to the storage and typically the storage goes into the elastic block storage.

29:55So the elastic block storage is like an external hard disk that goes with your machine...

30:00...so apart from the actual C drive on the machine...

30:03...you're going to be paying for every gigabyte that you would like to attach to that machine.

30:09So this storage can vary quite widely.

30:12You might have a dataset that is just 5 gigabytes and then you're just paying for 5 gigabytes...

30:18...or you can have a dataset that goes up to 2 terabytes or more.

30:21And then you're going to be having multiple EBS blocks, each contains different datasets...

30:27...and all of them are attached to the same instance.

30:30And if you have that...the same dataset attached to multiple instances...

30:35...you would paying for that times the number of instances.

30:40And I'll have a later on example that'll explain that at a little bit more detail.

30:44But for the time being, if you're trying to look at the costs of just one machine in the cloud...

30:50...you have to consider the hourly rate that goes with the instance type that you've chosen...

30:54...the storage capacity that you have attached to that machine...

30:59...in addition to the network costs, which is expressed as data transfer in and out.

31:04I've listed here just some example for how the costs work.

31:08For the data transfer, Amazon has a promotion, so for the time being it's free...

31:14...but what we understand is that it's not going to be free forever.

31:18As for the data transfer out, first gigabyte per month is free...

31:23...but after that the first 10 terabytes are 15 cents per gigabyte...

31:28...and after that as your load increases, the prices start going down.

31:33But that kind of gives you an idea that if you are going to really equate a machine running in your environment...

31:39...and what you would get in the Amazon bill, these are the three things to take into account.

31:45And if you understand how long you're going to be running your instance, the storage capacity...

31:51...how many users are going to be sending requests using the network...

31:56...you can estimate the cost that you will see on your monthly bill.

32:04Speaking of instance, there's a very important concept just in case this is the first session you attend for the cloud...

32:11...the AMIs are one of the important concepts that go hand in hand with using the cloud.

32:17It's a machine image, so once you've created an instance, it has the software...

32:22...it has the data, it has everything you need, you create an image.

32:26And the image in the Amazon cloud is called an Amazon Machine Image.

32:31Esri has been working on creating AMIs that include our software, so we have two available.

32:37One with ArcGIS Server 10 and another one with enterprise geodatabase...

32:42...and if you start from these AMIs and create your own by launching an instance from this one...

32:48...and then setting it up with your data, then saving that as your own custom AMI...

32:54...whenever you use that custom AMI, you have a ready-to-use machine...

32:58...not just with the software, but with your data and with your applications as well.

33:06Other services and I'm going to come back and see how they relate to the patterns that Andrew's been talking about earlier...

33:14...but just to understand, these are very important basic services and that's really what makes...

33:19...these are the bits and pieces that make the cloud solutions, how you use it and how you deploy it.

33:24Another service is the Elastic Load Balancer. And this is an important service...

33:28...because it plays the role of a load balancer that does the brokering between different instances.

33:33So if you have a distributed environment, you would rely on the load balancer to distribute the load between those different machines.

33:41The load balancer doesn't just work as a load balancer between a few machines in one data center.

33:46It works with the cloud, so it's elastic enough to go across different zones...

33:52...across different data centers, and it will also grow with the load.

33:58So it works, in a sense, a little bit different from what a physical load balancer will do. It's more suitable for the cloud.

34:04So if you're doing something in the cloud, this would be a very important service.

34:09The way they charge for it is per hour, so you would pay, like 0.025, I think that's like a quarter a cent per hour...

34:23...for using it, just for having it up and running. And then you would pay per gigabyte of data process.

34:29So if you've seen the previous prices for the data transfer in and out...

34:34...if you are going to calculate a certain data going in and out throughout...through your instance...

34:40...that would be the same amount of data that would be going through a load balancer as well.

34:45And the Amazon CloudWatch is a service provided by Amazon.

34:49The purpose of it is to make monitoring easier.

34:52So once you turn it on, you can monitor the progress of your machine resources.

34:59So it will monitor the processor utilization, the memory utilization, the network utilization...

35:04...and you can see the graphs that express that on hourly rates.

35:08That service costs 0.15, I’m not sure, that's like less than a quarter dollar an hour.

35:17In general, that would be around $11.00 per machine per month.

35:22So if you have like three machines, that would be 11 times 3 per every month.

35:27And it's one of the really handy services as well.

35:31Also worth mentioning, the elastic IP.

35:34So part of the nature of the cloud, when you start a new machine...

35:38...it will be assigned a new IP address and it will include a new host name...

35:42...and a lot of people typically configure their machines based on a known IP.

35:48So if you want to avoid this nature of changeable IP address...

35:52...you can attach an elastic IP to your machine and from there on it will always have that IP.

35:59So that's a stable IP. It never changes.

36:01Once you create it, it sits there and you can attach it to any machine you start and that will become its IP.

36:06So that's the way to control the elastic nature of the cloud if you want to have a tied-down, known configuration.

36:14The way they charge for the elastic IP, there's no cost for having it up there...

36:21...but you actually start paying for it if it's not attached to a machine.

36:26So as you see, the class model kind of varies widely between the different services.

36:31So I want to make sure you kind of understand the basic ones and then you should know that as you...

36:37...kind...discover new services, always check what the price model is like. Don't make assumptions.

36:43So this one, you actually pay for it if you're not using it. But if you're using it, you're not going to pay.

36:49And the remapping, which is the reassigning.

36:52If you keep reassigning it to different machines, based on this reassignment, they will charge you.

36:57So the first hundred reassignments to the machine are free...

37:01...but after that you start paying a certain charge for it, which is around 10 cents.

37:10One more service to explain really how the elasticity works in the cloud.

37:15So everybody hears the words AMIs, which is the machine image...

37:20...and they understand an instance. But how does this elasticity really work?

37:24If you want to implement elasticity, the AMIs really play a very important part in it.

37:28Because what happens is that you want to automate the ability to see if these machines that I have running...

37:37...for example, I have two instances, and if these two instances are having a CPU utilization higher than 70 percent...

37:46...I would like to go and start another two instances.

37:49And you want something to do this automatically for you.

37:52That is the elasticity of the cloud. And that is really done through that service Auto Scaling service.

37:58So the Auto Scaling service will utilize the CloudWatch to monitor the CPU utilization...

38:05...and you can define in that service that I would like to start two more instances if these ones are utilized that much.

38:13And then once these two new instances are up and running, I would like them monitored as well.

38:18So if they are not used that much, so if they are...if the processor utilization of the new instances, the auto scaling just started...

38:28...are used less than 10 percent, I would like the auto scaling to shut them down and go back to just having two running.

38:35So this ability to add new instances depending on the utilization can be done programmatically.

38:42You don't have to keep monitoring it and then from there do it manually.

38:47You can automate the whole aspect using the Auto Scaling service.

38:51And that is really how elasticity works in the cloud.

38:53It's the ability to use the AMI to create instances when you need them and shut them down when you don't need them.

39:01For that service, the way Amazon charges for it, it comes at no extra cost.

39:05The cost goes for using the CloudWatch service...

39:08...as well as the time you pay for the instances when they're running, so the actual cost of the instances.

39:17Now a word of caution. When you are doing the elasticity, it's always good to understand what you expect...

39:28...or at least do some assumptions around when you expect to have those extra instances running...

39:32...because in the end you're going to get a bill. And that bill is going to charge you for every hour every machine ran.

39:39So if you don't know ahead of time that you're going to need to start four instances and keep them running for two weeks...

39:47...it's good to maybe not have them run, but...that's part of the risk aversion.

39:54You want them to be running so users will find them, but you should know your bill will be affected.

40:00So always kind of have this trade off and know that while you can start the extra instances...

40:05...and it's really great to avert the embarrassment of having your site go down because of extra load...

40:11...always be aware that this is going to reflect on the bill...

40:13...and be prepared to see that variation in the bill when you start those extra instances.

40:22So part of the beauty of the cloud is that it's pretty vast.

40:27However, the Amazon cloud has kind of enabled the ability to know where your software...

40:34...or where your instances will be running.

40:36Because there are a lot of limitations or a lot of requirements that certain data would not leave certain borders.

40:43Certain content would be hosted in specific places.

40:47So from that perspective, Amazon has identified where the cloud is really running.

40:53They have four regions. One in the east coast, mainly in Virginia. One in the west coast here in California.

40:59There's one in Europe in Ireland and another one in the Asian Pacific realm. It's in Singapore.

41:06So you can pick where you want your machines to be running...

41:10...and you can identify from there that's going to be the geographic location.

41:14Now within every region, there's a set of different zones, which represent different data centers.

41:21So you can be running all in the east coast and still be geographically redundant.

41:26Each of these zones is a completely different data center that sits in a different location within that state.

41:38So in general, kind of a recap, there are other services in the cloud and each charges in a different way.

41:44But these are maybe the basic ones that touch on the different deployment patterns that Andrew has talked about earlier...

41:50...and I'll come back and kind of use an example to show you how they do.

41:54But in general, if you're trying to estimate costs, there are some kind of key rules.

42:00One of them is data size really plays a very important part in estimating the cost.

42:05Now if your data is not very large, say maybe 5 gigabytes...

42:11...and you don't expect a lot of people are going to be using the services on this machine...

42:16...say for example you have four or five users using that service randomly during the day...

42:22...it's not expected that the majority of the cost is going to be going towards the data transfer.

42:28The majority of the cost you're going to see is going to be really in the hourly rate...

42:33...the price to keep the CPU and the memory running for that many hours.

42:37The costs for the storage and the costs for the data transfer become pretty much negligible in comparison to the hourly rate.

42:46But if your data is very large, if we're talking maybe 1 or 2 terabytes...

42:52...that is going to be a significant cost if you have many users using that data.

42:57So then that becomes the part where you really need to come up with certain assumptions...

43:03...around how many users are really going to use that data and how much of that data will be moving around...

43:10...whether through requests that are incoming or outgoing, or just for updates and maintaining it.

43:16It would be important then to take into account the life span and the life cycle of the data management...

43:23...due to the fact that it will have a major impact on your cost.

43:26It will even probably be higher than the actual hourly rate.

43:30So it's always important to understand when you're deploying to the cloud, make certain assumptions.

43:35Understand a certain usage model or how the system is going to get deployed and how it's going to get used.

43:43And from there, make around these assumptions certain rules that you can use to estimate the cost for...

43:52...each one of the services, to estimate the actual bill that you're going to get.

44:00Now to use an example, this is one of the deployment patterns that Andrew's talked about earlier.

44:07You can see here that we have multiple ArcGIS servers...

44:10...so we've kind of discussed in detail in the earlier session this morning...

44:15...how the AMIs for ArcGIS Server work and how the instances would work.

44:21So to kind of recap on that quickly, using the AMI you would generate one instance, set it up with your own data...

44:29...with your own application, and then create your own custom AMI based on that.

44:33And then from that custom AMI, you can start as many instances that, as you launch them...

44:39...they will have the software configured, they will have your data, they will have your application.

44:44And then from there, you assign the Elastic Load Balancer to all those different instances.

44:49So in the cloud, we're not separating the SOM and SOC in the deployments.

44:53The Elastic Load Balancer is the main tool used to distribute the load between the different instances.

45:00So from that perspective, you are using here two services.

45:04The Elastic Load Balancer, to do the brokering, as well as the instances that will run ArcGIS Server.

45:11Now, knowing your services and knowing how many people are going to be using it...

45:15...you can estimate how many of these instances will be needed.

45:19And if you want to monitor them, you can use the CloudWatch service and from there you can keep an eye...

45:25...and see if you need extra instances to be started when you need them, you go and start them.

45:30And when you don't need them you can shut them down.

45:38So this is what an Amazon bill looks like. They usually break down the number of hours from the different services.

45:49So in this case, based on a large Windows instance that was running that many hours...

45:55...and of course, within a month it's impossible to run that many hours.

45:58This actually represents many instances. So they lumped it all into one item.

46:05So you see that many hours, around 2,000 hours by...multiplied by the rate 0.48, we get that cost, $1,000.00.

46:15Then the storage, that's the EBS drive, and over here this is how they break the cost for it.

46:22So you could see the gigabytes per month, the number of gigabytes multiplied by the rate, and then the number of requests.

46:30These are I/O requests going to disk. And also the backups for this disk. And that's what a snapshot is.

46:41And from there, the number of requests to store that snapshot and retrieve it. So that's how the storage costs are.

46:47And you can see this is not a very high cost in comparison to the hourly rate...

46:51...and it's because the data we're talking about is not very large.

46:56And then the Elastic Load Balancer.

46:57So if you have multiple instances and you were trying to distribute the load between them, that's what the service is.

47:02And you can see how the cost is broken down for that.

47:05And the Amazon CloudWatch, that's the one used for monitoring.

47:09So that's kind of the breakdown of the EC2 bill. But this is the actual bill of everything.

47:16So this contains everything that Amazon would bill you for. It includes the S3, which is the Simple Storage Service.

47:24This is like the big file server in the cloud where you can put your data and once you put it there, it's published.

47:32It's also good place to leave your data as a transition while you're setting up your environment.

47:38So in this case we haven't used S3 so there's no cost there.

47:42But if it is used, as you get access to it with an account, you will see the cost here.

47:49Also, the data transfer.

47:51You can see it's pretty negligible because there wasn't really much of a load on these instances that were running.

47:57But that's what the bill would look like and you can see it up above the title that this was marked for one month.

48:04So Amazon bills monthly, whatever you have running in the infrastructure, you will get that bill.

48:09And at the beginning, they ask you to give them a credit card to create an account.

48:14And put a limit on that credit card just to make sure that if they hit that limit, they notify you before they go and bill more.

48:22But what they will do given that mark, they will get the bill every month...

48:26...and they will bill you to your credit card according to that.

48:33So a couple more things to take into consideration and going back to the time to market...

48:40...beside just thinking on this as hardware, there's...

48:44...you really need to kind of maybe think of it also as a different way to do things...

48:48...because of the nature of the cloud, to make the best of it...

48:51...maybe you need to learn a few new habits.

48:57Something to consider, if we compare the time in the past it took for procurement, hardware setup...

49:02...IT setup, software setup, this has all been approximated in just going and launching an instance.

49:09So launching an instance takes about 15 minutes. And once you launched it, it's ready to use.

49:13You can start copying your data, copying your application, and in comparison to the number of days...

49:19...or weeks sometimes it took to accomplish all of that, it's become really fast and easy.

49:25Next thing to do is to, once it's set up, you can go and create your own custom AMI.

49:30So even the time it took to set up your data and application loading...

49:34...next time you launch an instance, that has been approximated. You don't have to do that except once.

49:39Once you launch the instance based on your custom AMI, it's got everything ready.

49:44So from that perspective, you really need to start thinking about maybe a different way to trouble shoot.

49:51You're not really tied to one instance. If you created an instance and it doesn't have a persistent problem...

49:58...just for like, suddenly it stopped working, a lot of the times now it's okay to go and terminate that instance...

50:05...and just start a fresh one that works. It saves you a lot of time from that perspective.

50:10Also, kind of the way you do updates. You don't have to take a machine down to do an update.

50:14You can go and create another instance, do the update, and then switch them.

50:18And when a machine is ready, you can put it behind the load balancer and now everybody can access it.

50:23You don't really have to make it available all the time.

50:26So, taking these things into account, and how you manage your time, and how you do things...

50:32...you can actually be a lot more effective in very little time and do things very, very quickly.

50:39But with great power comes great responsibility.

50:42So there are a few things to keep in mind, and one of the most important recommendations I make...

50:50...if you really are going to use the cloud, you really have to follow up on what you start and make sure you terminate it or you stop it.

50:59Because a lot of people are in the habit of once you get a machine up and running...

51:02...it's running and then you go and do something else. Even though you don't need it anymore, it's still there.

51:08You don't recognize that you are going to get billed for it until you get the bill.

51:13So some of the best practices is really to remember. You just use the software and the hardware when you need them.

51:20When you don't need them anymore, you stop it. So you stop paying for it as well.

51:25And then when you need it again, you start it and you start using it again.

51:29So that's really one of the best recommendations to keep in mind.

51:33Also, using the AMIs.

51:35Like I just showed you, it takes away a lot of the things you used to spend a lot of time on unnecessarily.

51:41So now that you have a ready-to-use AMI, you just launch the instance and it's ready to use. It gets everything you need on it.

51:47Also, elastic IPs. If you think of a distributed environment that keeps changing its IPs...

51:52...elastic IPs is one of those really good features to take into account...

51:57...so once you've configured your environment, you don’t have to keep reconfiguring it.

52:01Then having the AMIs with the elastic IPs and the Elastic Load Balancer, everything really works much easily...

52:08...and it's a really easy job to maintain it from there on. Also, should add to automate wisely.

52:18So I've seen a lot of folks get very excited about the fact that we have web services in the cloud...

52:23...and now they go and start building scripts to all sorts of very exciting things and very great stuff...

52:29...but then you find that it really wasn’t used much. It didn't really save them that much time.

52:34So it's always good to consider that there are web services to enable you to do all sorts of things in the cloud...

52:40...but that doesn't mean you should just go and start building scripts unless you really need them.

52:46And like I just said, troubleshooting takes a whole different paradigm.

52:51So if a problem is not persistent, it's just a fluke or if it's just happening today...

52:57...you don't really have to go and keep troubleshooting it to get that machine up.

53:01You could just kill that instance and go and start a new one.

53:03And that saves you a lot of time and saves you a lot of effort.

53:09Just a quick note, there are a few good references to take into account when you are doing this type of cost calculation.

53:17One of them is the Amazon Calculator on their website. It's a very nice tool. Excuse me.

53:23And also, keep an eye, because the prices in Amazon do change.

53:28Luckily they change to be cheaper most of the time, but they do change a lot.

53:34And also the services. They keep providing new services all the time.

53:38So maybe they release a new service that you find to be really good for you, works better...

53:43...and then you can migrate to that rather than keep using the one you have.

53:47So this is something to keep an eye on.

53:49And also because it's a new environment, there's a lot of blogs out there...

53:52...and a lot of people are willing to share their information and expertise through them.

53:55So if you're very interested to learn what other people are doing, you will find a lot of information out there.

54:03So give this back to Andrew and...

54:07I think maybe this will work.

54:13So yeah...we also want to make sure that we give you the message that...

54:19...there is support and services today, if you're interested in doing this on your own.

54:24I’m sorry, not on your own. If you need assistance.

54:28There are certain licensing questions that will inevitably come up at the end of this session when we ask you to...

54:33...give us some questions, and we'll address those, but there aren't easy entry ways into this.

54:40There are custom servers that we provide. We've got a jump-start package for you.

54:46There's architectural assistance, you know, through your distributor or out of your...through account management.

54:54There's a bundle that we're offering and there are experts very close by that can speak to the bundle.

55:01And there are premade AMIs that we've been working on for quite some time.

55:06And with ArcGIS 10 this is supported out of the box. So with that said, I'm going to do a bit of a review.

55:14We're not done, that's for sure, but there's a lot of information that's being thrown around at you today.

55:19I mean the reason why we wanted to have a business section, discussion I should say...

55:24...in addition to technical ones, is, I mean, think about what Marwa just went through.

55:28Think about the implications for you setting up the wrong way. Right? How much it could potentially cost.

55:35So let's rewind a little bit and just think back to how we began the discussion today.

55:39You know, is the Amazon cloud right for you? It's Infrastructure as a Service. You need to understand that.

55:47The patterns and practices, yes, but what does ArcGIS technology do for you today?

55:51How can it better serve you in the Amazon cloud?

55:55We gave you a very brief introduction to an approach for beginning to dive in and investigate from a business perspective...

56:05...how the platform should align with your business processes, and business cases, right?

56:12Sometimes folks do things just 'cause it's cool. Right? And maybe that's a valid reason.

56:18But I think what we're trying to...to get across to you is let's have a good reason to do it and then we'll do it.

56:24I'm just playing around in a development environment.

56:26That's a great reason, to be honest with you, 'cause then you get to know how the technology works.

56:31Think about all the different abstractions we talked about today. You need to become familiar with those.

56:36But, you know, the main points that we thought were important today, and there are many more, not in any particular order though...

56:42...but are elasticity, I think this is a big deal in the GIS domain. I really do.

56:49I've seen limitations and failures with deployments because we just can't get to enough CPU when we need it.

56:56That barrier is going away.

56:58Time to market. Time and time again it has taken us a long time to get a technical workflow up...

57:04...and supportable so we can support the business. This eliminates that as well.

57:10Risk aversion. You know, I love the concept that if something's not just working I can kill it. That's a neat concept.

57:21And then the budgetary one too. I mean I thought this was important to include today, because personally I've had success...

57:27...in swapping around budgetary arrangements to pay for cloud deployments, and with clients as well.

57:33And that's simply...

57:37How many people capitalize their hardware on their budgets?

57:42I mean, do you own this hardware that you're deploying ArcGIS Server to with Amazon?

57:47You don't technically own it, which means it comes from a different expense budget.

57:52 So the message here, again, you've seen this in the plenary, we've talked about it today...

58:01...is that ArcGIS 10 is the enabling technology here.

58:05It's pervasive. It can be deployed on premise as part of your enterprise or locally, or in the cloud.

58:12Other things don't change.

58:13The capabilities are still there for visualization, for the creating your data, managing your data.

58:19This has huge implications for a collaboration message. Huge. Right?

58:24The discovery of data, managing your data, analyzing data.

58:27 ...This is genuine transformation of the platform.

58:32So, ArcGIS 10 is a complete solution, as well as a complete system. So did we include our...? No.

58:44[Unintelligible] Yeah, we're going to do some Q&A now. Is that okay?

58:50I had some predefined topics that I was going to suggest to you, but apparently it was in a different presentation.

59:00 So with that, no awkward pauses, let's open the floor. Yeah, we'll start with Lisa.

59:09What are the security implications to using the cloud? [Unintelligible]

59:26Sure.

59:27Do you get security with the cloud [inaudible]?

59:31Do you want to repeat the question first?

59:32Yeah.

59:35Sorry, so the question is what are the security implications for using the cloud?

59:41The instances that you use in the cloud typically have two levels of firewalls.

59:46One that is set by the cloud itself; it's called the Security Group.

59:51And the other one is a firewall local to the machine itself.

59:55So within the instance itself you have pretty much good control over the security.

1:00:00The part where the cloud gets to be more open is when you are exchanging the data or moving it around.

1:00:07And for that part, the recommendation is to either encrypt your data or to resource for something...

1:00:15...like a virtual private network where it's a special connection that's very well encrypted...

1:00:20...very well isolated from the rest of the cloud.

1:00:22So in terms of specific federal security regulations and certifications and accreditations...

1:00:30...the cloud has only been certified and accredited for moderate level.

1:00:34So not for all sorts of federal certifications.

1:00:38So from that perspective, they're not considered something as efficient as an on-premise environment.

1:00:45So it's worth kind of knowing the details and what you need...

1:00:49...what exactly is the security level you're trying to achieve...

1:00:52...and from there looking at a specific service in the cloud that will match that.

1:00:58[Audience question] So do you have to manage the [inaudible] as far as on that specific [inaudible]?

1:01:02Yeah, the security groups are very easy to manage.

1:01:05In the other session that we have on the cloud, if you'd like to attend it, we demonstrate how you set this up.

1:01:10It doesn't take...it takes less than a minute. Very fast and very effective.

1:01:16So if all what you want is just to make sure nobody else is going to be accessing your machine, you can control that.

1:01:20Like I said, there are two levels.

1:01:22There's the security group, which includes many instances, but there's also the local firewall.

1:01:26You can turn that on and keep it enabled for your instance.

1:01:29And then if you are exchanging any data that you feel is sensitive, you can keep it encrypted and that will protect it.

1:01:37In a sense, there's sometimes not a lot of differences between different zonal approaches within your own business today.

1:01:46Not sure who's next.

1:01:48[Audience question] Can I, for example, implement a three-tier architecture...

1:01:52...and keep the database server on premise with the web server, application server in the cloud?

1:01:59The question - and pardon me if I get it wrong - but I think your question is, Can I implement a three-tier architecture...

1:02:04...where I have the database on premise, correct, and the web server and application server in the cloud?

1:02:11So is the presumption that you would be going back to your on-premise data in real time to draw it back?

1:02:17I don't think that would be a best practice, okay? You're creating a lot of single points of failure there.

1:02:23There might be a better way of taking the information, the data, out of that on-premise instance...

1:02:28...and moving it onto the cloud in some way, shape, or form that's optimized for serving it back out.

1:02:33I don't know if you want to add anything to that.

1:02:35Yeah, I would say that would be the recommended approach is keep your database with your server.

1:02:42Because they communicate through TCP, and you don't really want that to be over the Internet.

1:02:46Yeah. Yes, sorry. Yes.

1:02:49[Audience question] Is there an educational cost schedule for universities and colleges?

1:02:57Is there an educational cost schedule for universities and colleges.

1:03:03Does your university or college, you know, have an enterprise license agreement with E-S-R-I, Esri?

1:03:08[Audience answer] Yes.

1:03:09Okay. So yes, there's a cost arrangement and agreement there.

1:03:12[Audience question] Is that on the Amazon side as well?

1:03:13No. As far as I'm aware today, the answer is no. I don't know if anybody else wants to chime in on that from the audience.

1:03:21I can confirm that, that these are two separate things.

1:03:25The way the AMIs work is you start them, but you bring your own license, so if your license is an ELA...

1:03:31...you can then use it as many times as you need depending on the number of cores you're starting.

1:03:36But if your license is only four cores, you are bound to the same rules you are bound to in on-premise environment.

1:03:42Plus you'll get the bill that Marwa showed you, or the university will.

1:03:47Yeah, so these are two different costs right now.

1:03:49We're not bundling the licensing with the actual Amazon costs.

1:03:53And Amazon bills you for their costs, and you have your license...

1:03:57...and you license the instances once you enable them based on that.

1:04:02I don't know if you want to add anything.

1:04:03[Audience participation] So Amazon does have a really neat grant program. Go to aws.amazon/grant.

1:04:10Universities and other educational institutions can take advantage of their grants, and they provide free [inaudible].

1:04:17[Inaudible audience question]

1:04:18Yeah. Aws.amazon/grant.

1:04:23Yeah. Thank you, Neil.

1:04:25Any questions regarding our bundle too, this is a great resource over here, Neil Tomlinson.

1:04:31So we have some more hands. Yes?

1:04:33[Audience question] You mentioned that you have two Esri AMIs right now that you're testing.

1:04:39How does the individual organization create their own for deployment and use in the cloud?

1:04:46So if you're going to create your own AMI, we recommend that you base it on the Esri AMIs.

1:04:53So you probably want to build it because you have your own software stack that you would like to add to the Esri software...

1:05:00...or are you talking about just replacing what Esri has done in their own AMIs?

1:05:04[Audience answer] Adding additional things. Adding data, having [inaudible]...

1:05:09Sure.

1:05:10...[inaudible] certain use cases.

1:05:11Yeah. Start with ours is what we want. Yeah.

1:05:13[Audience question] You can start with yours, add to it and save it as your own.

1:05:17Yes. And that's the concept of a custom AMI.

1:05:19Now these AMIs are great to distribute internally within your organization, but according to our license setup...

1:05:27...when you start sharing it with another organization, that you need to come back to Esri with that.

1:05:32[Audience question] If I have an ELA, I can use it in my organization.

1:05:34Yes. Yes, absolutely. Yes?

1:05:39[Audience question] My question had to do with the reserved instances and Amazon's pricing structure.

1:05:43Does that only apply to one instance, or are there like...

1:05:48Because I heard you say, well, you can just kill that instance and create a new instance, you know.

1:05:54How does that work with the reserved instances if you only get one, or can you get multiple instances with the reserved...

1:06:00What they say is you have two instances running for the duration of a year. Okay.

1:06:04Now you could stop and start and kill and start new instances.

1:06:08As long as there are two instances running all the time, you will achieve the cost savings that they promise you by doing that.

1:06:18Yes?

1:06:19[Audience question] Do you support these [inaudible] AMIs with the [inaudible] on premises?

1:06:23I'm sorry.

1:06:25[Audience question] Like running an [inaudible] against the cloud on premises...

1:06:28...do you use those AMIs like you use other AMIs?

1:06:31Well, these AMIs are now built and optimized for the Amazon environment.

1:06:36They take advantage of specific capabilities in the Amazon environment.

1:06:39To build something similar to that for different virtualization software would require building it for that software.

1:06:47But right now, the ones we have work just with Amazon.

1:06:50[Audience question] How would you go about building them?

1:06:54So the question is how would we go about building that custom one?

1:06:57I think we could maybe just have a sidebar conversation with you.

1:07:00Yes, and also the other session we have, How to Use ArcGIS Server in the Cloud, we go into a lot of details.

1:07:05We had that one earlier today. There's going to be two other offerings for it Thursday and Friday morning.

1:07:13We go into a lot of details on how you start your own instance, how to set it up with your own data...

1:07:18...and just create your own custom EBS, custom AMI from there.

1:07:22If you would like, I could show you that also offline. Yes.

1:07:29[Audience question] Correct me if I'm wrong, you said that, in terms of like optimizing ArcGIS Server...

1:07:33...you wouldn't want to add SOC machines; you would want to use the...

1:07:38Full AMI.

1:07:39[Audience question] ...the elastic cloud and just add SOC instances on that one machine?

1:07:44Now when you launch an instance from the AMI, it includes both the web applications, the web server...

1:07:51...the SOC and SOM, all on one machine.

1:07:53So what you do, when you start multiple instances, is you enable the Elastic Load Balancer to seed these different instances...

1:08:02...and it will do the brokering between them and...

1:08:05[Audience question] Isn't that more than one SOM on each machine then?

1:08:09Yes. In that case, the SOM isn't really doing any distribution.

1:08:13[Audience question] For the actual...

1:08:14Yeah, it's just running on one machine, so...

1:08:18[Audience question] But that's the difference between, like, real hardware...

1:08:21...where you add another machine that you dedicate as the SOC machine, right?

1:08:25It's a different approach, but we've found that to be a very efficient approach for the cloud to kind of deploy it in that way.

1:08:32So you have one AMI and then you create multiple instances.

1:08:36The load balancer works very well if you're trying to do geoprocessing and stateful type of services.

1:08:43You can use the sticky sessions in the Elastic Load Balancer and that will allow you to do that kind of thing pretty seamless.

1:08:49The only drawback for it is that ArcMap doesn't really support the sticky cookies yet.

1:08:57The deployment pattern though that you're talking about is utilized, you know, not just in the cloud.

1:09:05We can talk more about that later too, so whether it be a software load balancer or a hardware load balancer. Yes?

1:09:12[Audience question] So does that mean that I only have to have several SOC instances [inaudible]?

1:09:20With this deployment pattern, that is correct. Yeah.

1:09:24Yes?

1:09:26[Audience question] Go ahead and tell us about your jump start and your bundles.

1:09:30Okay. We'll start with the bundle, okay?

1:09:33We actually have the gentleman who architected this thing sitting right here...

1:09:36...so that's why I'm looking at Neil, for the bundle anyway.

1:09:39You want to come on up? I'm glad you came.

1:09:43I'm not.

1:09:50So do you have a specific question about the bundle?

1:09:54[Audience question] How it works, cost.

1:09:55Okay. So basically it's a preconfigured instance that we have wrapped our term licensing around.

1:10:03It enables a lower point of entry for standing up ArcGIS Server, and it does take advantage of the AMI.

1:10:09So everything we've discussed up here is possible with the bundles.

1:10:13[Audience question] What is the cost?

1:10:19Yeah. Can we take that offline? Okay, great.

1:10:22Have you sync up with your account manager. What's that?

1:10:27[Inaudible audience question]

1:10:29Well, not offline. I just think that we... It has to do with his particular licensing.

1:10:34So the cost of a four-core AMI would be no different than a four-core license that you're deploying on premise.

1:10:43So if you're paying X amount of dollars for that four-core license, it's the same. You can take your licensing anywhere.

1:10:50You know, it's just within an audience, I don't want to presume what people are paying for their four cores of license.

1:10:57The retail cost is $40,000.

1:10:59So for a four-core license, to deploy it in Amazon, you can take your licenses wherever you want to go.

1:11:08So I would encourage everyone, now we have the Managed Services Island available in the booth area.

1:11:15If you would like to stop by, we could give you an idea about the differences between the bundle...

1:11:19...and the managed services packages that are all based on the cloud.

1:11:23So if you want to leverage that and have Esri do the management on your behalf, you can learn about that.

1:11:30You can learn about the costs and all the details regarding that.

1:11:34[Audience question] Which island?

1:11:35The Managed Services Island. Any other questions? Yes.

1:11:46[Audience question] The EBS, is that tied to an instance?

1:11:49Yes. Typically an EBS is attached to a specific instance.

1:11:52[Audience question] So if you upload data to an EBS, say if you had three instances running...

1:11:58...do you have to upload that for each one separately, or should you upload it to one, kill everything, redo [inaudible]?

1:12:06Well, it depends. There are different approaches to that.

1:12:10Some folks prefer to put it on one EBS drive and share that like a Windows share, just like you do on premise...

1:12:17...and from there have multiple instances all look at one EBS drive.

1:12:21Or another alternative is you can create one EBS drive per instance.

1:12:26So to do that, just like you create an AMI for a machine, there's a snapshot for an EBS drive.

1:12:32So you can create a snapshot and from there launch multiple copies and then attach it to each of the instances.

1:12:39The latter is actually the most recommended, which is considered best practice, because you can see with it the best performance.

1:12:48[Audience question] Is Esri looking at branching out into other cloud services? I know Windows has Azure and ones like that.

1:12:55I'm just curious to know, are you looking at setting up the equivalent of AMIs for those?

1:13:02Yes, we are. Okay.

1:13:03Yeah. But to elaborate a little bit on that, Azure doesn't have the infrastructure capabilities for services.

1:13:10As they do, we are going to definitely be interested, but right now you can use the API to build your applications...

1:13:16...and do what you need with it using specific components that we have available on that.