AWS Case Study: swisstopo
Swisstopo, the Swiss Federal Office of Topography, is responsible for Switzerland’s geographical reference data and all associated products. Hanspeter Christ is the deputy process manager of the Federal Spatial Data Infrastructure (FSDI) for the Federal Coordination Centre for Geographical Information, a division of swisstopo, and is responsible for the operation of the FSDI’s server park, which consists of more than 50 servers, the majority of which exist in the Amazon Web Services cloud.
Swisstopo first used Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) in February 2008 to meet an urgent time-to-market demand for a new Web portal for one of its key customers. This first implementation was proposed and realized by the IT company Camptocamp SA in a very short time and in tight partnership with Swisstopo. After this trial, the Swiss Federal Office of Topography was sold: “This positive experience and existing performance and capacity problems on our on-premises infrastructure convinced us to move further substantial parts of our FSDI into the AWS cloud.”
Swisstopo is particularly interested in the elasticity and flexibility of AWS. “We’re managing many small- to medium-sized Web geographic information system (GIS) projects for our customers, which all require specific server infrastructure. Thanks to AWS, we can significantly shorten the time for the allocation of new servers and strengthen our focus on the real customer needs during a short project phase.”
Swisstopo currently serves with its Amazon EC2 instances up to 30,000 unique visitors per day. This equates to data transfer of 8 TB per month; up to 1,300 delivered map tiles per second; 250,000,000 preproduced map tiles in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3); and 40 GIS applications with 40 Web map services for Swiss Federal offices, among other customers. Swisstopo estimates it is now possible for the FSDI team to launch a new server within hours, instead of the weeks or months it took before using AWS.
In addition, the migration of swisstopo’s existing systems onto AWS was, according to swisstopo, “a great opportunity to tidy up legacy issues.” The AWS infrastructure is made available via an application programming interface (API), which substantially simplifies the daily routine. “It not only freed us from fiddling with physical hardware but also made standardization and automation of our server infrastructure easier.”
Swisstopo now operates a significant part of the FSDI integration and production environments on Amazon EC2, while test environments run on-premises on the swisstopo intranet (see Figure 1).
Figure 1. FSDI server park and its management
Camptocamp set up a highly automated system to manage and provision all swisstopo FSDI servers using Puppet, a data center automation and configuration-management framework. This approach allows swisstopo to manage a virtual on-premises server infrastructure almost identical to its similar servers in the AWS cloud, which reduces vendor lock-in and obviates the management of huge numbers of binary machine images.
Swisstopo uses Amazon Elastic Load Balancing to distribute the incoming traffic across its multiple Caching Proxies (Varnish) and to enable failover in an easy manner. Swisstopo uses Amazon S3 as an inexpensive storage location for its millions of map tiles. According to Christ, the highly scalable, reliable, and fast infrastructure of Amazon S3 allows swisstopo to render map tiles with broadly constant access time, independent of the current application load (see Figure 2).
Figure 2. Amazon EC2 and Amazon S3 within the swisstopo FSDI
Christ plans to implement Amazon CloudFront to speed up the distribution of swisstopo’s map tiles even more. “The ephemeral nature of Amazon EC2 internal storage forced us to implement reliable recovery processes for all our servers,” says Christ, “which is a great plus now in case of [potential] serious incidents.”
Christ singles out the transparency of AWS usage charges as very helpful to his organization, making it simple for swisstopo to distribute the costs of the cloud server infrastructure among customers. From a cloud service consumer perspective, Christ also particularly likes the customer-oriented continuous development of Amazon’s infrastructure services. “In an on-premises environment, I had to implement all these enhancements at my own expense. I automatically profit from Amazon’s development while operating my systems on AWS.”
To view swisstopo’s GIS application running on Amazon Web Services, visit http://map.geo.admin.ch 
. To learn more about swisstopo, visit http://www.swisstopo.admin.ch . To learn more about the Swiss Geoportal, visit http://www.geo.admin.ch . To learn more about Camptocamp SA, visit http://www.camptocamp.com .
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