Geoprocessing on the Amazon cloud computing platform — AWS

With the continuously increment of the available amount of spatial data sets, science, industry and administration require web-based geo-information concerning storage, availability and processing. The development of spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) bring about the Web-based sharing of large volumes of distributed geospatial data and computational resources. A powerful, dependable and flexible information infrastructure is required to process heterogeneous and distributed data into information and knowledge. The emergence of Cloud Computing technology brings a new computing Information Technology (IT) infrastructure to general users. With cloud computing platform, the users can requisition compute power, storage, and other services - gaining access to a suite of elastic IT infrastructure services as demands. This paper presents an implementation of geoprocessing service that integrates Amazon cloud computing and geoprocessing functions to provide geoprocessing competence in a distributed web environment. The integration combines the geospatial processing functions with the flexible cloud computing platform to provide Web-based geoprocessing functionalities. Challenges, approaches and architecture for integrating are discussed. Amazon cloud computing platform is adopted to demonstrate the implementation.