Spatially Adjusted

Tag: esri

  • ArcGIS Server Revisited

    Legacy GIS System

    We were talking this weekend about how much serving up GIS data has changed in the past 3 years.  GIS Server used to be so important to many of my friends companies to the point they spent tens of thousands of dollars on it a year.  But no longer, each one said that they stopped paying for server because they all use other options.  Now before I go on, I want to say this isn’t about sales data of Esri products.  It’s more about changes in how people are sharing spatial data.  Feel free to replace ArcGIS Server with your favorite GIS server package (Title is a bit of SEO, right?  Heck I’m not even talking about ArcGIS Server in this post).

    I gave a talk years ago about something we did at the GNOCDC mapping recovery from Hurricane Katrina.  You can see the slide deck here and watch the video here.  Basically it was the seeds of what we are going through right now.  It wasn’t that what we were doing back there was very unique, it was just a realization that GIS can’t be hosting “enterprise” data in a “workgroup” environment.  Just like Katrina basically broke the GNOCDC GIS servers, it has become clear that there is almost no way for an organization to use classic GIS servers without putting a lot of load balancing and networking decisions in front of them.

    For most companies this is just way too much infrastructure and licensing costs.  We’ve seen the rise of CartoDB, Mapbox and ArcGIS Online (or whatever it is called these days).  Each has pluses and minuses and while there is overlap, they all do things unique to themselves.  But what the big attraction for each is that you don’t have to manage the constellation yourself.

    The biggest drawback each said was the unknown in licensing.  Most hosted GIS plans are costed in ways that GIS people aren’t familiar with.  Mapviews?  Nobody has analytics on that until you put it in these services.  100,000 map views sounds huge doesn’t it?  But how do you really know?  Service credits?  We’ve wondered what that even means for years.  But I’d wager beers that even with the unknown, you’ll still save money over your ArcGIS Server license or other maintenance you pay for hosting your own GIS server.

    We’re at a crossroads here.  People have begun to start realizing standing up ArcGIS Server, Geoserver or other map servers makes little to no sense in the new marketplace.  Paying for hosting maps is cheaper in the long run, has more availability and is easier to use that classic self hosted mapping solutions.  ArcGIS Online for all it’s confusion is beginning to be leveraged by users and everyone I knew at the Esri UC knows what CartoDB and Mapbox do.  Back in the old days of WeoGeo, we had to prove what we know now every day.  The cost of “doing it yourself” is magnitudes higher than paying for hosting.

    Tide is changing…

  • SpatialTau v1.4 – Backend Irrelevance

    SpatialTau is my weekly newsletter that goes out every Wednesday. The archive shows up in my blog a month after the newsletter is published. If you’d like to subscribe, please do so here.

    What We See

    Do you care about the Google Maps backend?  I mean do you really think about how their server stack is run or managed?  Of course not, Google has successfully abstracted out the server part of Google Maps to the point we just assume it will always be available and running.  But it isn’t just Google, Esri and their ArcGIS Online (or whatever they call it) just runs.  Sure it has its idiosyncrasies that make us all angry and frustrated but as with Google we just assume it will always be available and running.  Back when I worked at WeoGeo, SLAs were very important to how we did business.  Our SLA and our data provider’s SLA were so important to how we did business.  Most people I talked to who wanted to build upon our platform were interested in what our SLA was.  I know Google and Esri have SLAs available but I rarely see people curious about what they are and build contracts around them.  They are assume it will always be there and always be available.

    To the Nines

    High availability is something that is always talked about with these services.  How many “nines” is your device available?  That was a point of pride.  Of course if you built upon Amazon or another provider, you could only offer as good as their SLA is.  One picked providers that have “high nines” in availability so that you could pass on that SLA to your own customers.  Heck, it was why you outsourced the hosting, even 3 nines is an incredible uptime level.  What about Esri’s SLA?  Well, I found this PDF dated from last year:

    Esri will use commercially reasonable efforts to make the Covered Services available with a Quarterly Uptime Percentage of ninety-nine point nine percent (99.9%) (“Service Commitment”).

    That’s “three nines” which is just about 9 hours downtime a year which is noot bad for most GIS applications.  But I wonder how many of us looked at it.  OK, what about Google Maps for Work SLA (Google renames this product way too much)?

    Google will use reasonable commercial efforts to provide Maps API web and mobile interfaces that are operating and available to Customers 99.9% of the time in any calendar month.

    Gee, pretty much exactly the same as Esri.  Now I have no idea what Esri’s or Google’s true availability has been over the course of the year.  I haven’t heard anyone complain about ArcGIS Online lately nor have I ever heard someone complain about Google Maps for Work.  One has to assume they are both running at least 99.9% availability.

    Should We Care?

    I think the answer is absolutely.  As we move more and more into hosting our services, we need to be more and more aware of what we are getting ourselves into.  I’d wager that 8-9 hours on average downtime a year is fine with most applications.  But that needs to be take into consideration when migrating your legacy self hosted GIS applications into “cloud-like” environments.  I know as a contractor, I’m always keeping my clients aware of what it means to be hosted in Google, Microsoft or Amazon’s cloud including the SLAs.  Eventually Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Rackspace, etc will have a downtime that will affect your applications.  Death, Taxes and a server crashing going down are the only guarantees in life.  We need to plan for this inevitability and have plans to alert our users/clients to this possibility.  Sticking your head in the sand and ignoring the problem is not going to help.  Being proactive and having a plan will.  Take a look at your hosted services, the SLA for each and what you can do to mitigate the failure or one or more.  You’ll be glad you did!

  • ESRI Technical Support Problems

    I just got this email in response to my email asking where the promised response to my technical issue was:

    Our support department is currently experiencing a high call volume and this, in turn, is causing a delay in our response time. You can expect an analyst to contact you by phone or e-mail within the next three to five business days.

    We are working hard to reduce our queue wait time. We anticipate hiring 5-10 additional staff over the next 45 days to help alleviate this problem. Your business is important to us and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

    We ask that you do not escalate the incident unless it becomes an emergency and the response time does not meet your needs. If you decide to escalate this incident, please respond providing the reason it has become an emergency.

    3-5 business days? Of course it might have been nice to have gotten that email when I first sent in my request. I guess I’ll just reinstall ArcInfo to see if that fixes the problem.

  • David Maguire on how ArcGIS Explorer works

    Link – ArcGIS Explorer – how it works

    Upon start up the client automatically makes a web services connection to a set of ESRI ArcWeb Services globe services. The web services are powered by ArcGIS Server 9.2. A new set of explorer services has been added to the Server core so that anyone (with ArcGIS Server) will be able to create and publish a service. It will also be possible to view ArcIMS and OGC WMS services. As you navigate around the globe, page views are streamed across the web to the desktop application for rendering. All the tasks (mini-applications) are server resident and are called from the client.

    David posts a new screen-shot of ArcGIS Explorer (finally one with satellite imagery). How much quality will be put into these images is just a guess for most of us but since the screen shot is zoomed out so far, I guess it isn’t as good as Google Earth. I suspect it will be better than Public ArcWeb Services, but less than what one could buy via ArcWeb. Where that will put ESRI in relationship to Google Earth is anyone’s question. I’d suspect though that the greater choice of layers that will be available in ArcGIS Explorer coupled with the fact that you can easily connect to so many different geospatial servers could make ArcGIS Explorer a good competitor for Google Earth.

    What is clear though is that ESRI is looking at ArcGIS Explorer to drive sales of their server products and in the end this will probably result in ArcGIS Explorer complementing Google Earth, rather than replacing it. It all hinges upon if users can create WMS and other geospatial server links as quickly as Google Earth users jumped on KML. We’ll just have to wait for the beta and see how it goes.

  • ESRI ArcGIS Explorer Website Up

    Link – ArcGIS Explorer – thanks to all who sent this in

    Well here we have a nice close look at ArcGIS Explorer including this screen shot of the interface.

    Ae

    It has a very nice Windows XP look to it vs the non standard look of ArcGIS (yea i said it) and Google Earth. The screen shot is somewhat disappointing as it doesn’t show up satellite imagery but take a look at the “table of contents” on the left hand side and tell me you aren’t really interested in more information.

    Update – as I sent this out, Darren Cope linked to the same page also. He’s put some of his own spin on the ArcGIS Explorer story and why he thinks it might have a chance at being quite successful.

  • Google Maps + ArcSDE + ArcIMS + ArcWeb =

    Link – Google Maps + ESRI’s ArcWeb Services

    • Users can geocode by city (Lawrence), address (1930 Constant Avenue, Lawrence), zipcode (66047), or the intersection of streets (9th & Iowa, Lawrence). We are using the Public Services category of ESRI’s ArcWeb Services.
    • The black and white imagery is coming from ESRI’s ArcSDE through ArcIMS. We are using the ArcIMS cache on demand system that I mentioned here. The reason for this is the lack of quality imagery data that Google provides for most of Kansas.
    • The Map client is the Google Maps ajax client.
    • The Road data is from Google Maps (Teleatlas).

    Quite a novel way to get around limitations of all the products. You’d think with so many sources and different servers this would be slow, but it looks quite snappy and is a big improvement over the standard Google Maps version. Great job guys!

  • David Maguire on ArcGIS Explorer

    Link – ArcGIS Explorer – geographic exploration system

    With ArcGIS Explorer you can fuse data from multiple servers (OGC WMS, ArcGIS Server, and ArcIMS) and overlay local vector and raster data sets. The task-based interface allows fast visualization of massive 2D and 3D server-resident global terrain, raster and vector databases. The user interface exposes additional tasks for navigation, routing, geocoding/reverse geocoding.

    David lets us know a little more about ArcGIS Explorer including that the beta will be out in a couple weeks. The biggest question I have so far is what ArcWeb services will be free? There is so much available for cost, but the free Public ArcWeb services choices are small. I can only hope that they will have good imagery by default, but at least support for most GIS server applications should allows others to fill the gap. I guess we’ll also see one of Sean Gillies’ favorite Web 1.0 applications integrated into ArcGIS Explorer, The Geography Network. Are there any plans to improve that service? What printing options do users have? Can we here more about the personalization and customization of ArcGIS Explorer (and I assume ArcGlobe server on the back-end)? What are the basic system requirements for ArcGIS Explorer (Google Earth runs wonderfully on my laptop, but ArcGlobe is a dog)? Does ESRI plan to have a community developed around ArcGIS Explorer (a huge issue as GE has a wonderful community and the current forums at ESRI are difficult to use)?

    I’d love to see some screen shots or a video though of ArcGIS Explorer in action.

  • 2006 ESRI Developer Summit Announced

    Link – 2006 ESRI Developer Summit

    Join us for the first ESRI Developer Summit held on March 17 – 18, 2006 at the Palm Springs Convention Center in Palm Springs, California is a two day event for GIS, Mapping, and Spatial Developers.

    Event features include

    • Keynote presentations on developer opportunities in GIS
    • In-depth technical presentations by ESRI staff
    • Community Center
    • Tech Talks
    • Birds-of-a-Feather Forums

    Thanks to Art, Rob and Brian for getting this going. I’ll be there.

    Devsummitlogo06

  • Tracking Tropical Storm BETA

    Tropical Storm BETA Public Advisory

    Another week and another storm in the Caribbean is going to cause havoc for residents. These storms with Greek names are just freaky, though I can assume if you are hit by one its name isn’t very important considering more pressing needs such as food, water, shelter. Anyway, you can track the storm using either ESRI’s storm tracker application or the Hurricane Tracker.

    Ts beta

  • ESRI’s ArcGIS Explorer Revealed

    Both Ed Parsons and Jeff Thurston give us a quick look at the new ESRI ArcGIS Explorer at the 20th ESRI European User Conference. I’m not one to use the word “Google Earth Killer” until I’ve played with it, but both Ed says:

    ArcGIS Explorer will be a free 15Mb download from the ESRI website and will connect to a dedicated ArcWeb server farm at ESRI providing an experience similar to Google Earth, although I was not clear where the imagery is sourced from. What got me excited however, is the ability of ArcGIS Explorer to use other data services including OGC WMS and WFS servers and any ArcIMS server you may already use. ArcGIS can also display local data, File GDB’s,shape files, most image formats and even KML files from your PC’s hard drive.

    Rather than the small controlled demo at the 2005 UC, this demo was of the actual product and it appears that it has impressed many GIS professionals. Jeff says:

    You are going to love this. This is a 2nd generation GIS product that is Google Maps, Google Earth, Virtual Earth and World Wind and more. ESRI has taken a major leap “a revolutionary leap” into the viewer exploration world.

    It is one thing to say that ArcGIS Explorer is a Google Earth competitor, but it would seem that ArcGIS Explorer will change the way people use GIS. I can’t wait to see it.