31 With support from the Forest Service, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, and the US Geological Survey (USGS), the first cross-agency geospatial data sharing service— the Interdepartmental Imagery Publication Platform (IIPP)—launched in May 2024. said. “We did an exhaustive analysis of 10 different hosting environments and scored those against eight criteria. The cloud popped out as the topmost viable option for costeffectiveness, capability, and expandability.” The IIPP site is hosted on Amazon Web Services using Esri’s ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes. Its cloud-native architecture scales quickly based on demand. “Kubernetes helped us design a system that doesn’t cost more than necessary when it’s not in use, and it can handle an onslaught of anywhere from 12,000 to 50,000 users,” Gillham said. In a test of its dynamic scaling capabilities, a new server was automatically added within seven minutes to meet a spike in demand. The containerization approach of Kubernetes reduces the technical complexity of the system by bundling the code and dependencies needed to run it, which makes provisioning a new server automatic and quick. “There’s just nothing else out there that can do that,” Gillham said. “We’re going from a system that would take two months to get another server added compared to under 10 minutes now for as many servers as we need to meet the demand, all automatically.” Kubernetes also allows agencies to maintain full autonomy in a shared system. “We come from a publishing group ourselves that hosts data, and the last thing we want is to lose access and control,” Gillham said. “When we reassured everybody that IIPP partners maintain full autonomy over their data, it helped relax some concerns and more agencies became interested.” A Platform for Sharing and Consuming Imagery The typical pattern has been for each agency to host its own copy of the same data. During the scoping process for IIPP, the team found that six agencies hosted duplicate sets of the high-resolution images that the US Department of Agriculture collects for the National Agriculture Imagery Program (NAIP). Since 2004, the Forest Service has served all NAIP imagery, which amounts to half a petabyte of imagery. Discussions have been ongoing with the Farm Production and Conservation (FPAC) Business Center, which processes and shares images through its Geospatial Enterprise Operations (GEO) division. FPAC GEO had coincidentally been making a migration to Amazon Web Services, too, which makes further efficiencies possible. “When their NAIP data becomes cloud optimized, we’re hoping FPAC GEO will be able to make it available to us, at which point we can eliminate our copy,” Gillham said. “When we’re connected directly to FPAC source data, then the minute they update that data it’s instantly updated for all our users. That’s an efficiency government should always strive for.” This cloud-to-cloud data sharing switch illustrates the efficiency gains that increase imagery sharing. It not only removes the cost of storing imagery more than once but also reduces labor costs to manage the data at each agency. The IIPP team has been talking with nine federal agencies to answer questions and address past data- and costsharing challenges. An IIPP governance charter has been established to define roles and responsibilities, and a working group sets standards for how data is published and used. IIPP has a publishing tier for agencies that want to host data, and a consumer tier for agencies that want access to published datasets. Guiding Good Governance
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjA2NTE0Mw==