Feature
FltPlan.com serves flight-tracking maps to the general aviation industry.
As the user base grows, Roktech simply increases the amount of data delivery services it requests from Amazon S3 and charges FltPlan.com accordingly.
For more information, take the Esri free Web training seminar, "Implementing and Optimizing ArcGIS Server Map Caches."
ArcGIS Server SOC and SOM, serving dynamic (i.e., MSD) services
ArcGIS Web server
it in the same map. Esri obviously gave these new APIs some serious thought. The [ArcGIS] Server team made it incredibly simple to make engaging, dynamic mapping applications that attract so many users." Roktech decided to use Adobe ColdFusion to process the tiles and prepare them for the upload to the Amazon S3 service. Harris said ColdFusion was chosen because it's tightly integrated with Adobe Flex and makes Internet application development and deployment quick and easy. It is also a natural fit for creating Web applications with ArcGIS Server. Once the cache is converted, it is simply uploaded to the Amazon S3 service. Roktech uses Bucket Explorer (www.bucketexplorer. com), an interface for Amazon S3, for uploading the cache because it is extremely easy to use and does the job quickly. According to Harris, uploading the cache takes time and requires patience but is well worth the effort because the payoff is huge. Sustainable Growth "Because of the time-sensitive nature of flight planning, we wanted to provide the smoothscrolling map service for users—like the kind you'd see on the big sites like Google Maps," said Ken Wilson, president of FltPlan.com. "Esri and Roktech found a way to do that for us, giving our sites the speed of the larger
www.esri.com
ArcGIS Servercached tiles on the Amazon S3 Service
ArcGIS Servercached tiles on the Roktech network
Other Web-based applications (company Web site, etc.)
Very High Bandwidth
Typically 5 MB throughput, but cannot become saturated
Very High Bandwidth
10 MB dedicated, burstable to 100 MB
Saturated Bandwidth
Usually a T1 at ~1.5 MB
Web-based client
Comparing the old and new architectures
sites. We could not have sustained the popularity of our sites with slow-rendering maps." Until the price of adding multiple T1s becomes ridiculously cheap, HaaS cloud computing is an inexpensive solution for the bandwidth bottleneck experienced by smaller
organizations. "I don't know the nuts and bolts of it," Wilson confessed. "I do know that Esri and Roktech helped us meet our goals of immediate mapping at a fraction of the price of expanding our fiber network. In the end, that's all that matters."
ArcUser Fall 2009 15