About this blog

'Going Spatial' is my personal blog, the views on this site are entirely my own and should in no way be attributed to anyone else or as the opinion of any organisation.

My tweets on GIS, Humanitarian, Tech, Games and Randomness

Thursday 15 September 2011

Scottish Natural Heritage with our data services


Our online map services was highlighted on the BBC this week: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-14898280

A World's first online service that displays an up-to-date and accurate picture of Scotland's Greenspaces. The cloud servers we had running spiked a couple of times but held steady and we had the knowledge that we could quite quickly, bring up new servers in a matter of minutes if required.






Tuesday 6 September 2011

Our own cloud?

With a bunch of old servers coming back and planned for decommisioning, we are seriously considering setting up our own Private cloud that is hopefully compatible with Amazon Web Services. There's a number of options around that we are considering:

Having our own private cloud means that we can continue to research into cloud technologies without having to pay our current provider (in this case, Amazon Web Services) while we 'mess around'. Of immediate interest is our need to move Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) from one region to another, vitally important after AWS suffered yet another outage recently which was widely covered here and here and here. More seriously, one of the issues was the discovery that some disk blocks in their Elastic Block Store (EBS) were being deleted by a rogue process. This was probably only discovered when, during the outage, clients moved across their services from the affected zone to a new zone, or spun up new instances from their stored AMIs and finding out, too late, that these templates were not viable.


Update

Rather lazy of me but I re-directed a lot of my blog material to an internal company facing one instead. I am now going through a process where I clip out useful bits (with the okay from my employees) and populate this blog. I should have plenty to post but it has been a bit too long!