cloud computing for geospatial applications

Geoserver for sharing geospatial data on AWS

Overview

Teaching: 20 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

How do I quickly share a large amount of geospatial data between my collaborators?

How can I leverage available cloud tools to enhance data sharing?

Objectives

Understand how cloud computing can help you disseminate your data quickly

Use Amazon Web Services to spin up a quick instance of an open source server for geospatial data (Geoserver)

Understand potential use case

Using the AWS s3 (Simple Storage Solution) bucket

Allows a bunch of people to dump in their data instead of giving everyone access to your virtual machine
You can set access permissions
s3 serves as backup - you can also move really old data that you don’t need rapid access to to Glacier storage
Use sync to transfer data from s3 to EBS
Use s3 Lifecycle rules to move data that’s older than X date to glacier

Since your data is stored on S3 there is no need to to re-download data when you want to do analysis on an AWS instance. You can use the S3 API to call your data.

Why use Geoserver?

Web map and web feature service
Open source :-)

Set up Geoserver

install Apache Tomcat (for stability, use Tomcat7)
install Geoserver
Install OpenGeoSuite from Boundless! - comes bundled with PostGIS and bunch of other tools.

geoserver set up

Costing

s3 bucket - 3TB ~ $1100/year
Glacier - 5TB ~ $450/year
ec2 Instance (m4.large) with 2TB EBS ~ $3400/year
Total cost ~ $5000/year

AMIs

The good thing about setting your server up on the cloud is that you can easily create machine images! A machine image is a replica of your root applications and snapshots of your volumes (i.e. data). Caveat: You need to set up snapshots and there’s a small associated cost. You can easily share your Geoserver setup with collaborators.

And if you’re lazy…

I have an AMI created with Geoserver installed - I’ll share.

Ways to save $$$

You may not actually need 8TB of storage space! Don’t be a data hog. s3 buckets can easily be plugged in anywhere!
Turn off your EC2 machine if you’re not using it!

Key Points

AWS s3, EC2 and EBS

Creating AMIs