In this episode of the Uhuru podcast show Ming Lee, the manager of on-line operations at ESRI UK, talks about the tremendous benefits his company has seen in taking their Global Information Systems (GIS) software to the cloud. By moving to virtual machines on hosting services like Amazon Ming has reduced IT costs and increased capacity to handle large amounts of traffic and processing all at the same time. Ming can spin up new machines as fast as he wants, and take them down when no longer needed. Ming has looked as Platforms as a Service (PaaS) but found that the highly customized apps he supports won’t run well on them. However, new GIS apps are being written with the cloud in mind from the start (such as not relying on the OS for state) which will enable even more productivity improvements in the future.
Be sure and check out the GIS web site Ming helped make possible that tracks Diamond Jubilee events throughout the UK, in celebration of Queen Elizabeth
http://www.diamondjubileebeacons.co.uk/pages/interactive_map_171898.cfm
http://www.diamondjubileebeacons.co.uk/pages/interactive_map_171898.cfm
Another great GIS site Ming supports focusses on the Titanic:
http://storymaps.esri.com/stories/titanic/
http://storymaps.esri.com/stories/titanic/
You can read Ming’s blog here:
