What is ArcGIS Server on Amazon Web Services?

ArcGIS Server on Amazon Web Services allows you to deploy ArcGIS Server on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). ArcGIS Server runs on Amazon's hardware and is administered through web services.

Advantages of deploying your server on Amazon EC2 include the following:

• No installation required—You don't have to install ArcGIS Server yourself. Instead, you use a downloadable utility, ArcGIS Server Cloud Builder on Amazon Web Services, to create your ArcGIS Server site on Amazon EC2. Once you create your site, you can immediately connect to it and begin publishing services from ArcMap.
• Scalable on demand—You can configure your site so that additional GIS servers are added in response to certain triggers, such as CPU usage. New servers can be created in a matter of minutes, allowing your site to gracefully respond to abrupt spikes in traffic. When you no longer need the instances, you can destroy them and incur no further charges for them.
• No hardware infrastructure to maintain—Deploying ArcGIS Server on Amazon Web Services requires no special hardware; you just have to be able to connect to the Internet. After creating your site, you can gain fine-grained management of your server through the AWS Management Console, a web application provided by Amazon. You can log in to your server through Windows Remote Desktop Connection to fine-tune your data, services, and applications.
  Deploying your server in a cloud environment allows you to use as many or as few computing resources as necessary without committing to a long-term purchase of hardware or other IT infrastructure.

About this help

This help system focuses on how to deploy ArcGIS Server and use enterprise geodatabases on Amazon EC2. It also includes special topics about maintaining and scaling your deployment on EC2.

If you need general information about ArcGIS Server or enterprise geodatabases, you should visit the ArcGIS Help. The ArcGIS Help describes how to publish services, configure security users and roles, create web applications, build geodatabases, and so on.

Links to the ArcGIS Help are provided throughout this help system where appropriate.