We are starting to look at what it would take to move our entire GIS infrastructure to the cloud. This would include our enterprise geodatabases and Enterprise deployment.
I'm not terribly concerned about the Enterprise deployment part of the move. The portion that I'm really interested to hear peoples thoughts/ideas/experiences on is the actual data migration/setup/configuration/performance.
There are several logistical questions we have in order to fully understand what it would take on our end to provide our users with their familiar desktop setups if our enterprise databases were in the cloud.
- Is there a preferred/recommended cloud environment between Azure and AWS. Are there any glaring reasons to use one over the other?
- If our data is in the cloud, how would users make direct connections to the geodatabase for adding datasets to Pro? ... are you able to connect to a database via an IP address? ... do feature services become more important?
- If our data is in the cloud, are you able to use OS authentication to make a direct connection to the geodatabase or does it require a named user in the database?
- Is there a performance hit when connecting to a cloud geodatabase?
- Is it recommended to use remote/cloud desktops to connect to a cloud geodatabase to improve performance?
I'm sure there are many things I've overlooked, we are mainly interested in getting our heads wrapped around the logistics of a move to the cloud.
Any thoughts/ideas/suggestions are welcome!