In the old days, you would buy, unwrap software and run it on your server. In the new paradigm of the cloud and web delivery, things are not so simple. A recent blog, by Stewart Harper from GIS/ETL specialist Safe Software, explains how to deploy its FME Server flagship in the cloud. A visit to the KubeCon tradeshow (8,000 attendees) convinced Harper that Kubernetes is now the de-facto standard for container orchestration with ‘staggering’ growth. Kubernetes as a service is available from Amazon, Azure and the Google clouds and Safe has tested deployment on all of them. Harper recommends Google’s Kubernetes engine as ‘the simplest and a good place to start’.
Kubernetes deployment is not for the small shop! It is recommended for larger organizations with a dedicated team seeking efficiencies in software development and operations. Kubernetes makes it easy to automate deployment of complex large-scale applications by ‘shifting infrastructure to code’, allowing for version control of the infrastructure and making development, staging and production ‘testable and reproducible’. Kubernetes makes a clear distinction between the operating system, application management and application code, and allows specialized teams to focused on each area. Kubernetes builds an abstraction layer on top of the cloud infrastructure, abstracting any cloud-specific settings into properties that you set. The approach promises ‘cloud-agnostic’ deployment. For more read Harper’s blog.
Safe also recently published an informative ‘how-to’ on the eight different ways in which spatial data and maps from a variety of sources and formats can be viewed in a web browser.
© Oil IT Journal - all rights reserved.