The U.S. Department of Education (ED) participated in the Federal Geographic Data Committee's (FGDC) GeoCloud Program in 2012. The GeoCloud initiative provides selected agencies an Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosting platform to on-ramp their geospatial applications. ED migrated its on-premises ArcGIS for Server for the School District Demographic Data System (SDDS) Map Viewer (http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sdds) to Amazon EC2. SDDS is publicly available and allows access to information about demographics, social characteristics, and economics of children and school districts from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Using GeoCloud, ED gained experience with cloud-based Windows 2008R2 Server and Esri ArcGIS 10.1 for Server platform. It has been almost one year now and we'll reflect on various lessons learned including planning, security/hardening, AWS console, server configuration, reliability, licensing, and backup strategy. We will discuss the current state of our server deployments and future plans for ED in the Cloud.

1. MOVING ARCGIS SERVERS TO
AWS CLOUD HOSTING
Presented by Tai Phan & Amy Ramsdell
NCES, Blue Raster, Sanametrix
2013 ESRI Federal GIS Conference – February 27, 2013

2. FGDC’S GEOCLOUD INITIATIVE
 FGDC-sponsored hosting in Amazon Web Services (AWS)
 A Geospatial Platform activity lead by FGDC’s Douglas Nebert
 GeoCloud provides a common platform for deploying and
documenting geospatial cloud services
 Enables organizations to
 Leverage other agencies’ experiences
 Reuse and share server configurations
 Gain experience in cloud-based server and application deployment
http://www.fgdc.gov/initiatives/geoplatform/geocloud

3. DEPT OF ED PARTICIPATES IN GEOCLOUD
 National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)
The primary federal entity for collecting
and analyzing education-related data
 NCES uses ESRI technologies
to provide geospatial context to education data
 Hosting migrated to GeoCloud in 2012
 School District Demographic Data System
 Public School Boundary Collection and Verification Project
http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sdds/

5. SCHOOL DISTRICT DEMOGRAPHIC DATA SYSTEM

6. PUBLIC SCHOOL BOUNDARY COLLECTION AND VERIFICATION TOOL

7. GEOCLOUD ARCHITECTURE

8.  Costs:
 Operating hours – Reserved instances
 BYOL for RDS and AMIs with database
 Disk space
 35 GB root drive with ~5 GB free
 Support forums or paid support
 Amazon staff active in forums
 Amazon restrictions:
 Elastic IPs – Limit of 5
 Security groups – Can’t change once applied
 SMTP – Undisclosed limit, consider SES
PLANNING

9. SERVER CONFIGURATION – AWS CONSOLE

10. SERVER CONFIGURATION - AGS AMI
 Considerations for ArcGIS Server Windows 2008 Server AMI
 Need Web Adaptor for port 80 otherwise open port 6080 in security group
 WWW service turned off by default

11. SERVER CONFIGURATION - AGS AMI
 Apply any Windows updates

12. SERVER CONFIGURATION - AGS AMI
 Lock down SQL Server Express dynamic port setting to 1433

13. SERVER CONFIGURATION - AGS AMI
 ArcGIS license manager is based on machine id
 Id will change when used as an AMI template
 Lock down the license manager ports to 27000
and 27001

14. MONITORING IN AWS CONSOLE
 System/Instance Status Checks - 2/2 checks
 Can create status check alarm

15. MONITORING
 Amazon Service Health Dashboard
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (N. Virginia)
http://status.aws.amazon.com/
 Website monitoring

16. BACKUP STRATEGY

17. BACKUP STRATEGY
 Instance backups
 Powershell scripts
 http://messor.com : AWS Disaster
Recovery Automation
 Scheduled task on Micro instance Windows 2008
server
 Daily volume snapshots
 Weekly AMIs
 Clean up snapshots and AMIs
 Database backup to S3
 Using Cloudberry and Powershell

18. SECURITY – AMAZON LEVEL
 AWS admins
 All accesses logged and audited
 Cannot log in to instances
 EC2 Instance isolation on physical machine
 Use VPC for dedicated instances

19. SECURITY – IAM CONSOLE
 Control users and groups within account
 Unique security credentials for access keys and login/passwords

20. SECURITY – INBOUND RULES
 Inbound network traffic controlled through security groups
 Ports 80 and 443 only open to the internet
 RDP 3389, MS SQL 1433, ArcGIS License Manager 27000, 27001 ports by
IP

21. SECURITY – AMI TEMPLATE
 Security hardened AMI template provided by USGS under
GeoCloud program

22. FUTURE PLANS
 Transition from GeoCloud
Amazon account
 Deploy on security hardened AMIs with Cloud
Builder
 FISMA C&A for Low Impact/Low Risk system
 Migrate front-facing applications to cloud

23. GAL (GIANT ACRONYM LIST)
1) AGS – ArcGIS Server
2) AMI - Amazon Machine Images
3) AWS – Amazon Web Services
4) BYOL - Bring Your Own License
5) C&A - Certification and Accreditation
6) EC2 - Elastic Cloud Compute
7) FISMA - Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002
8) IAM – Identity and Access Management
9) RDP - Remote Desktop Protocol
10) RDS - Relational Database Service
11) S3 - Simple Storage Service
12) SES – Simple Email Service
13) SMTP - Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
14) VPC – Virtual Private Cloud

24. FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Amy Ramsdell
aramsdell @ blueraster.com
703-842-0177
www.blueraster.com
blog.blueraster.com
Tai Phan
tai.phan@ed.gov
202-502-7431
nces.ed.gov/surveys/sdds/index.aspx