AWS Case Study: Junta de Extremadura and Sadiel

Recently, the company recommended that its client, Junta de Extremadura, Consejería de Fomento (The Spanish government in charge of the urban planning and land management of the Extremadura region) take part in an Amazon Web Services (AWS) proof of concept (POC), based on the idea that cloud computing improves efficiency, reduces costs, and increases speed, ultimately leading to enhanced quality and service.

Antonio Pablo Sánchez Lozano, Secretary General of the Consejería de Fomento, explains: “In recent years, there has been a breakthrough in the integration of geospatial technology in information systems from the Regional Government of Extremadura in Spain. The development of a regional infrastructure of geospatial data and services is a key element of an overall strategy that minimizes costs and recreates synergies between the departments that make up the Regional Administration."

In developing a regional infrastructure, the Junta de Extremadura faced two primary challenges:

1. The geospatial infrastructure must provide levels of performance and availability similar to other market solutions to avoid losing the interest of stakeholders and end users.
2. The infrastructure, with appropriate levels of service, involves a considerable investment in physical infrastructure.

The project involved the transfer of a number of geodata and geospatial services that form part of the regional infrastructure; the services measure the degree of mitigation of major risks to the system.

Sadiel used the following services to deploy the POC:

• Amazon Route 53
• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
• Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (Amazon ELB)
• Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS)
• Amazon Identity and Access Management (Amazon IAM)
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)

Programming languages used included Java, js, Postgres/Postgis, 52 North, Geoserver, geowebcache, JTS, Geotools, and ext.js. See the architecture diagrams below.

Sadiel’s involvement was based on the following tasks:

• Determination of the physical architecture support
• Identification and verification of system components
• Deployment of components
• Testing and use of Regional Infrastructure components

The project included the following modules:

• Geoserver: Geodata server according to the standard Web Map Service (WMS) of the Open GIS Consortium (OGC)
• 52North: Geoservice container according to the standard Web Processing Service (WPS) of OGC
• Sitex: Java EE application that contains the display data and geo-services manager
• Postgres / PostGIS: Database of geospatial information

The system interfaces were a geospatial data viewer that allowed the team to access and view geodata services; and a geoservices manager that allowed them to invoke the infrastructure and manage its response.

The data inputs were as follows:

1. User accesses the geodata viewer, selects one or more geodata services, and the system displays on the map.
2. User views the content of geodata services shown on the map.
3. User accesses the geoservice client. The client makes a request to determine the geoservices available.
4. User selects an available geoservice, enters its parameters, and invokes it. The system makes the request and sends the results.

The outputs of the system were:

1. A plot of the response of geodata services, shown on the geodata viewer
2. The list of available geoservices Infrastructure
3. The answer to calls for the geoservices

See the screen capture diagram below.

Antonio Pablo Sánchez Lozano notes that the POC has been an interesting experience. The success of which is based on three key criteria: “First, a response to the request of geodata has been achieved in less than 1 second; Second, a response to the request and resolution of the geoservices invocation is faster than previous responses, based on the type and amount of information processed; and lastly, the return on investment is better than the previous rate.”

To learn more, visit http://www.sadiel.es/ .

Added June 17, 2011