ArcGIS Server Cloud Licensing

Hurricane Katrina’s Eyewall

Animoto is a startup company that had to spin up 5000 Amazon EC2 instances in one week. They started on a Monday with 50 instances and by the end of the week they had 5000. Then a few weeks later they were back down to about 100. If they were using using Oracle for their database or the enterprise versions of Hyperic or Zenoss for their monitoring how would they have been charged?

Thinking Out Loud has a good post about the difficulty of adapting per-cpu licensing models to the cloud.

Spinning Up in a Cloud
It got me wondering about what plans, if any, ESRI might have for deployment of ArcGIS Server (AGS) to the cloud. It seems likely that the AGS scalability bottleneck will soon be a result of licensing rather than technology. Maybe it is already?

I still don’t see any premiere AGS server sites that I can point people to. Is this due to the in-elastic licensing model?

Take, for example, an emergency operations center. On a typical day, the load will be very low. During an emergency event, the load will skyrocket. The licensing model needs to support adding CPUs during peaks without requiring payment for idle CPUs during low periods.

This doesn’t just apply to AGS. I really would like to see a site that hosted CruiseControl.NET where I could configure it to autobuild ArcObjects based assemblies and run unit tests. Figuring out a fair pricing model will not be easy.

Amazon Dynamo

This graph is from a paper on Amazon’s Dynamo. I suspect other months (not during shopping season) would look quite different.

With a name like “Elastic Compute Cloud”, I would expect the price for EC2 to reflect the supply of available compute capacity – isn’t this what elasticity of supply is all about? Currently pricing does not reflect time of use. I wonder how much performance degrades for EC2 users during Christmas shopping season.

Amazon relaxes the Consistency part of the DBMS ACID requirement in order to achieve availability. Maybe another rule could be relaxed, the one saying keys should not have any meaning beyond their use as an ID. If we did this, maybe Peano keys could be used, providing a spatially enabled Dynamo-like system.

Forecast: Cloudy

News.com has a good update on Cloud computing.

John M Willis has posted a helpful summary of cloud computing vendors.

He doesn’t mention Sun Grid. So what’s the difference between a cloud and a grid? Looks like I’m not the only one confused.