The U.S. Department of Education (ED) participated in the Federal Geographic Data Committee's (FGDC) GeoCloud Program in 2012. The GeoCloud initiative provides selected agencies an Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosting platform to on-ramp their geospatial applications. ED migrated its on-premises ArcGIS for Server for the School District Demographic Data System (SDDS) Map Viewer (http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sdds) to Amazon EC2. SDDS is publicly available and allows access to information about demographics, social characteristics, and economics of children and school districts from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Using GeoCloud, ED gained experience with cloud-based Windows 2008R2 Server and Esri ArcGIS 10.1 for Server platform. It has been almost one year now and we'll reflect on various lessons learned including planning, security/hardening, AWS console, server configuration, reliability, licensing, and backup strategy. We will discuss the current state of our server deployments and future plans for ED in the Cloud.

1. MIGRATING DEPARTMENT OF
EDUCATION WEB MAPPING APP
TO AWS EC2
Presented by Tai Phan, NCES & Amy Ramsdell, Blue
2013 ESRI International User Conference – July 11, 2013

2. FGDC’S GEOCLOUD INITIATIVE
 FGDC-sponsored hosting in Amazon Web Services (AWS)
 A Geospatial Platform activity led by FGDC’s Douglas Nebert
 GeoCloud provides a common platform for deploying and documenting
geospatial cloud services
 Enables organizations to
 Leverage other agencies’ experiences
 Reuse and share server configurations
 Gain experience in cloud-based server and
application deployment
http://www.fgdc.gov/initiatives/geoplatform/geocloud

3. DEPT OF ED’S PARTICIPATION IN
GEOCLOUD
 National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)
The primary federal entity for collecting and analyzing
education-related data
 NCES uses ESRI technologies to provide geospatial
context to education data
 Two NCES Projects have migrated to GeoCloud in
2012
 School District Demographic Data System
 Public School Boundary Collection and Verification Project
http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sdds/

5. SCHOOL DISTRICT DEMOGRAPHIC SYSTEM

6. PUBLIC SCHOOL BOUNDARY COLLECTION
AND VERIFICATION TOOL

7. GEOCLOUD ARCHITECTURE

8. PLANNING
 Costs to project for expansion:
 Operating hours – Reserved instances
 BYOL for RDS and AMIs with database
 ArcGIS licensing
 Disk space
 ~ 40 GB taken by OS and Programs
 Support forums or paid support
 Amazon staff active in forums
 Amazon restrictions:
 Elastic IPs – Limit of 5
 Security groups – Can’t change once applied
 SMTP – Undisclosed limit, consider Simple Email Service (SES)

9. SERVER CONFIGURATION – AWS
CONSOLE

10. SERVER CONFIGURATION - AGS
AMI
 Considerations for ArcGIS Server Windows 2008 Server AMI
 Need Web Adaptor for port 80 otherwise open port 6080 in security
group
 WWW service turned off by default

11. SERVER CONFIGURATION -
UPDATES
 Apply any Windows updates

12. SERVER CONFIGURATION -
PORTS
 Lock down SQL Server Express dynamic port setting to 1433

13. SERVER CONFIGURATION -
PORTS
 ArcGIS license manager is based on machine ID
 ID will change when used as an AMI template
 Lock down the license manager ports to 27000 and
27001

14. MONITORING
 System/instance Status Checks - 2/2 checks
 Can create status check alarm

15. MONITORING
 Amazon Service Health Dashboard
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (N. Virginia)
http://status.aws.amazon.com/
 Website monitoring

16. SCALING CONSIDERATIONS

17. BACKUP STRATEGY

18. BACKUP STRATEGY
 Instance backups
 Powershell scripts
 http://messor.com : AWS Disaster
Recovery Automation
 Scheduled task on Micro instance Windows 2008 server
 Daily volume snapshots
 Weekly AMIs
 Clean up snapshots and AMIs
 Database backup to S3
 Using Cloudberry and Powershell

19. SECURITY – AMAZON LEVEL
 May, 2013 AWS received ATO from the Department of Health
and Human Services FedRAMP at the Moderate impact level
for AWS GovCloud (U.S.) and all U.S. Regions
 AWS admins
 All accesses logged and audited
 Cannot log in to instances
 EC2 Instance isolation on physical machine
 Use VPC for dedicated instances

20. SECURITY – IAM CONSOLE
 Control users and groups within account
 Unique security credentials for access keys and login/passwords

21. SECURITY – INBOUND RULES
 Inbound network traffic controlled through security groups
 Ports 80 and 443 only open to the internet
 RDP 3389, MS SQL 1433, ArcGIS License Manager 27000, 27001 ports by IP

22. FUTURE PLANS
 Transition instances to NCES cloud environment
 Migrate front-facing applications to NCES cloud
 Achieve FISMA C&A for Low Impact/Low Risk system

23. GAL (GIANT ACRONYM LIST)
1) AGS – ArcGIS Server
2) AMI - Amazon Machine Images
3) ATO – Authority to Operate
4) AWS – Amazon Web Services
5) BYOL - Bring Your Own License
6) C&A - Certification and Accreditation
7) EC2 - Elastic Cloud Compute
8) FedRAMP – Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program
9) FISMA - Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002
10) HHS – Department of Health and Human Services
11) IAM – Identity and Access Management
12) RDP - Remote Desktop Protocol
13) RDS - Relational Database Service
14) S3 - Simple Storage Service
15) SES – Simple Email Service
16) SMTP - Simple Mail Transfer Protocol
17) VPC – Virtual Private Cloud

24. FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Amy Ramsdell
aramsdell @ blueraster.com
703-842-0177
www.blueraster.com
blog.blueraster.com
Tai Phan
tai.phan@ed.gov
202-502-7431
nces.ed.gov/surveys/sdds/index.aspx