ArcGIS in Azure and local clients

[MikeWieggers]

Was wondering if anyone has already setup their ArcGIS environment in Azure and how they deal with connectivity from on-prem ArcGIS clients. E.g. any bandwidth issues or considerations? Any info is welcome.

Thanks,

MM

[JohannaKraus2]

This is so helpful thank you!

I came from a workplace with several eGDBs that hosted data for desktop users (arcmap/pro) and the services used in the web applications (so services and individual users would all be hitting the same eGDB).  Did you find publishing feature and map services to be better/faster from an eGDB in Azure rather than an on premise eGDB?  Or maybe easier to configure?

And just out of curiosity, how often do you sync changes between the 2 dbs?

[DEWright_CA]

Major points to consider; unless you have very deep pockets and have very large pipes to Azure; performance will always be an issue. The typical LAN/WAN interface will be 1GB between desktops to switches to your RDBMS server. 

Once you start trying to take the volume of data you would typically have in the eGDB and put in in the cloud; now you are going through things like firewalled or VPN connections, multi-hop connections between ISPs and finally the M$FT cloud.

Make sure the data you are wanting to work with there is designed for that purpose; the more data you have, the more reads/caching will happen and this will slow you down.

Also, consider that some of the Azure & AWS data hosting solutions also charge for throughput, so if you are working with large datasets and will be doing lots of reads/writes that bump that number you might see costs skyrocket....

[JohannaKraus2]

This is good - thank you!

[BugPie]

Yes, this is incredibly helpful. Thanks to all who are participating in this thread. I will add to this as we go forward with Paas testing.  

As it stands we have just stood up and pushed to Production our Enterprise 10.6.1 which is hosted on Azure. Due to the inability to use linked servers with the PaaS model for Azure SQL we had to move forward with the IaaS model using a VM in Azure to host our SQL server. Salesforce is replicating to an OnPrem SQL Server so we can query those tables and views into GIS eGDB. Not ideal but it works. 

Now I am working on building our Azure hosted SQL (PaaS) using Logic apps to move data from our Salesforce instance to the Azure Hosted SQL directly, no more need for linked server. I'm not too thrilled about what the outcome is going to be based on this thread and others I have read including ESRI documentation itself.  I'm hoping my very small GIS user base will be ok using services to edit eGDB data. Otherwise all our users are access our data via map services in custom apps or Portal. But, hey at least I have a working setup now which buys me a bit more time to try and make this work.