ArcGIS Enterprise is supported in many information technology (IT) infrastructure environments, including public and private cloud environments. Compared to alternative options, cloud services may provide increased reliability and resilience, decreased operational costs, as well as ease of administration and management of the associated workloads.
You can integrate cloud services with ArcGIS Enterprise in different ways.
- Install all components of ArcGIS Enterprise on virtual machines running in the cloud. ArcGIS Enterprise supports any cloud virtual machine offering, provided it meets the same system requirements as on-premises equivalent machines. See ArcGIS Enterprise on cloud platforms and Cloud deployment options for more information.
- Install some components of ArcGIS Enterprise on virtual machines running in the cloud, while using cloud services for other components. For example, you can use cloud storage for your system's object store, instead of creating an object store by installing ArcGIS Data Store on a virtual machine.
- Use cloud services to enhance the capabilities of a primarily on-premises deployment of ArcGIS Enterprise. For example, you can write backups of ArcGIS Enterprise to a cloud storage location.
- Publish services from cloud-based data stores. For example, you can create a map service that references data from a relational database service as an alternative to installing and managing a relational database management system (RDBMS) on your infrastructure.
- Deploy ArcGIS Enterprise using a cloud-native managed Kubernetes service. To learn about deployment options in Kubernetes environments, see the ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes system requirements.
For specific recommendations on selecting a cloud provider, see Cloud services and providers. Alternatively, if you’ve already deployed ArcGIS Enterprise and want to migrate it to cloud infrastructure, see Enterprise and cloud migration.
For more information about cloud storage integrations, see Cloud options for foundational system storage and Cloud options for user data.
Scenarios for cloud services integration
How you integrate cloud services with ArcGIS Enterprise depends on your specific business needs. The following scenarios describe a variety of situations in which an organization may benefit from cloud integration.
Use cloud storage to protect backups
A common rule of backups is the 3-2-1 strategy: have at least three copies of your data, in at least two different formats, with at least one copy stored offsite. Using cloud storage for backups makes it easier to follow that rule. By writing your backups to the cloud, you can protect yourself from situations in which a disaster makes your entire primary datacenter unavailable.
Use cloud storage to ensure availability of system storage
Cloud storage services such as Amazon S3 and Azure Blob Storage come with service level agreements that guarantee the service will be available a certain percentage of the time. Using those services greatly reduces the amount of effort it takes to ensure availability relative to managing the storage system yourself.
For example, ensuring a highly available object store using ArcGIS Data Store requires installing the software on at least three machines and investing in a monitoring strategy to address any problems before they result in system downtime. You can instead use cloud storage and ensure a highly available object store through your agreement with the cloud provider.
Use cloud databases to improve performance when accessing user data
Like cloud object storage, Database as a Service (DBaaS) offerings such as Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL and Microsoft Azure Database for PostgreSQL come with service level agreements that guarantee a certain degree of availability. In addition, DBaaS offerings are easier to scale both up and down to handle changes in data storage requirements. Some DBaaS products also come with database tuning tools that help administrators by making it easier to address performance issues.
Use cloud services to scale ArcGIS Enterprise in response to demand
If you have significant variance in demand for services published to ArcGIS Enterprise, you may need to add or remove computing power to handle that variance. When ArcGIS Enterprise is deployed on virtual machines in the cloud, you can use the cloud provider's tools to adjust the number of virtual machines in response to system load. In some cases, these tools enable automatic provisioning and termination of virtual machines. When ArcGIS Enterprise is deployed using a cloud provider's managed Kubernetes service, such as Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) or Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), you can enable autoscaling to dynamically resize the system based on load.