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on the real map. Later, authorities can use this information to implement
preventive measures to reduce road accidents. This GIS can be implemented
for any town, city, county, or region in the world as long as its satellite maps
are available on Microsoft Bing Maps.
7.1 Introduction
In its canonical definition of cloud computing [10], the National Institute of
Standards and Technology contended that “cloud computing is a model for
enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configu-
rable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and
services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal man-
agement effort or service provider interaction.”
Cloud computing is considered to be a new value-added paradigm for net-
work computing, where higher efficiency, massive scalability, and speed rely
on effective software development [1]. Having also capitalized on emerg-
ing business trends, such as capital asset control, carbon management, and
total cost of ownership, its uniqueness lies in its simplicity: It has promised
that every consumer, small business, and large organization will access any
information technology (IT) platform as a utility [5].
Despite some initial security concerns and technical issues, an increasing
number of businesses are considering moving their applications and services
into “the Cloud.”
*
Consequently, mainstream information communication
technology (ICT) powerhouses such as Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Apple, and
Google are heavily investing in the provision and support of public cloud
infrastructures. Although significant effort has been devoted to migrate
generic web-based applications into the Cloud, scant research and develop-
ment have been put into creating a generic design pattern for a geographic
information system (GIS) pattern in the Cloud.
To address this need, this chapter presents a systematic model to develop
and deploy cloud-enabled GIS applications based on a pattern-based archi-
tecture. The proposed architecture uses SQL Azure geospatial database,
Microsoft Silverlight, Microsoft Bing Maps, .NET Framework 4, Windows
Communication Foundation-Rich Internet Applications (WCF-RIA). Services
and the resulting application have been fully deployed in two mainstream
public cloud platforms, namely, Microsoft Windows Azure Platform and
Amazon Web Services. It is therefore arguable that the lessons learned and
*
In line with convention, we have capitalized “Cloud” when referring to the holistic global
interconnected infrastructure as opposed to any specific infrastructure provided.
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