This article may reference legacy company names: Continental Mapping, GISinc, or TSG Solutions. These three companies merged in January 2021 to form a new geospatial leader [Axim Geospatial].
Axim Geospatial's Steve Mulberry and Solution Engineer Zeb Steeby talk about Cloud management tools for ArcGIS Enterprise.
What migration tool options are out there?
At Axim we leverage all the major providers such as Azure, AWS, Google and others. When it comes time to build out the environment to support ArcGIS Enterprise and get ArcGIS Enterprise installed and configured. There are Cloud Provider Options and Esri Provided options. And, you can choose the option you need to use based on the business requirements and any SLAs that an organization has with its customers.
Cloud Provided Options:
- Web-Based Management Consoles - Consoles that can be accessed through a browser for controlling cloud services.
- Native CLIs - Locally installed tool and provides control of cloud services from the command line and allows for automation with scripts.
- Deployment and Management Tools - Allow for using infrastructure as code templates to automate building out the environment (Cloud Formation, Cloud Deployment Manager).
Esri provided options
The first two are built to work with the native cloud APIs:
- Cloud Builder Tools - Locally installed tools that can quickly build out and install ArcGIS Enterprise, can also be used with command line (Azure and AWS).
- Cloud Images or VMs - These are public images that come with the Esri stack preinstalled and only require licensing to start using.
- Automation Tools – There are a variety of IT automation tools like Chef, Ansible and Puppet. Esri provides a variety of Chef Cookbooks on GitHub that can be used to automate installation and configuration of ArcGIS Enterprise.
What should you consider before getting started?
- Cloud Costs - Understand the cloud pricing models (pay as you go, reserved). Most cloud providers have calculators to help estimate.
- Licensing - Make sure proper licensing of ArcGIS Enterprise is acquired as well as any other required software licenses.
- Security - Cloud providers are in control of the security of the cloud, We control the security in the cloud which includes access and making sure the environment is in compliance with any security protocols that are required.
- Business Continuity – To ensure critical business operations aren’t impacted we would need to understand any requirements for Disaster Recover and Fail-Over and if there is any need for High Availability.
Listen to the entire 7 minute VLOG here:
Additional Guidance
We hope this article has provided some value to you! If you ever need additional help, don't hesitate to reach out to the Axim team.