Looking for ArcGIS Server consultants for setting up and managing on AWS (Linux)?

Question

Hi All — I was wondering if by chance anyone on here knows of a good consultant for setting up and managing ArcGIS Server on an AWS Linux instance? Plenty of windows shops out there, but we were hoping to find someone more geared towards working with Linux. Thanks!

MarkKorver · Answer

Like Ben has suggested +1 on using the CloudFormation templates. My only caveat is that I typically suggest that new AWS users start simple by using the EC2 (virtual machine) console to deploy a single ESRI Amazon Machine Image (AMI) first, if only to understand what CloudFormation automatically does and to learn basic setup such as allocating storage to an EC2 instance by attaching Elastic Block Store (EBS) etc.

More specifically to the OP's question, and sorry I don't have a consultant name for you, but my observation is that folks familiar with Windows are hesitant to use the ESRI provided Linux (Ubuntu) Amazon Machine Images only because of their lack experience, and not because it makes all that much difference from an administrative perspective. This is for a number of reasons, but the main one is that AWS greatly simplifies the management of your Linux instance. For example, if the underlying hardware fails, you don't need a Linux admin to fix anything for you. You can just start a new instance, or be configured such that EC2 will automatically replace your server (Launch templates & Auto-scaling). In addition, the virtual machine image (AMI) is ready to go, ESRI has already prepared it for you, you don't need to install ArcGIS on the Ubuntu instance and once you have authorized your instance you can log into the ArcGIS web admin console as you would on a Windows based server. In a similar way Amazon RDS (AWS managed DB service) greatly simplifies managing your Enterprise Geodatabase. Backups - automated, patches applied, multi-az (datacenter) deployment - a radio button. The open source choice there is PostgreSQL. Getting that working is well documented here.

Back to your question, my guess is that there are ESRI users out there that could benefit from a Linux consultant, but probably really only need assistance from AWS technical account managers, or solution architects, and that mostly on the AWS, not the Linux bits.

BenTurrell · Answer

Hey Sean Miller‌,

There are a lot more windows users than linux out there for ArcGIS that is for sure! You can have a chat to your local esri supplier but if you are looking at launching an ArcGIS Server using linux in the cloud I would recommend using the cloud formation templates. You can find the details at the following links:

Deploy using AWS CloudFormation templates from the AWS Management Console—ArcGIS Enterprise in the cloud | Documentation…

These two links show 2 different deployment methods (Highly Available or Single machine)

AWS CloudFormation and ArcGIS—ArcGIS Enterprise in the cloud | Documentation for ArcGIS Enterprise

Highly available is generally 2-3 times the cost of standalone depending on machine sizes.

The high level summary is you create an s3 bucket and put your license files and server certificates in it. Open the cloudformation for single machine or highly available (make sure you pick ubuntu not windows 
). Fill out the parameters which is around usernames to create, passwords, what the bucket name is you stored the files in is called, and the url you want to access the server from at the end.

You then run the template and it takes ~1hr 10 minutes for a single machine or ~3hrs for a highly available machine (These are based on windows numbers though!)

If you have any questions feel free to post them as new questions and tag me and I'll help out as I can!

Thanks

Ben

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