Managing And Analyzing Massive Geospatial Data In The Cloud

The Challenges of Big Geospatial Data

Geospatial data such as satellite imagery, aerial photography, LiDAR data, and GIS vector data are growing exponentially in size and complexity. A single satellite can now capture terabytes of high-resolution imagery per day. Lidar surveys easily produce billions of 3D point measurements. High-precision GIS data encodes intricate details of landscapes spanning millions of acres. Analyzing such massive geospatial data can quickly overwhelm traditional computing resources.

Big geospatial data brings major processing and analytics challenges. File sizes in the terabytes or petabytes require high-bandwidth networks and scalable storage infrastructure. Processing power must scale to handle trillions of floating point operations for tasks like atmospheric correction, image mosaicking, feature extraction, and change detection. Analysts need flexible tools to filter, aggregate, transform, and visualize results across huge heterogeneous datasets.

Cloud Computing for Scalable GIS

Cloud computing delivers the storage capacity, processing power, and analytics tools needed to work with massive geospatial data. Leading cloud providers offer a suite of scalable compute, storage, database, analytics, and machine learning services well-suited to large-scale geospatial analysis tasks. With cloud virtual machines now packing over 100 cores and terabytes of RAM, even the most computationally-intensive geoanalytics workflows can run faster and at lower cost than traditional solutions.

In addition to raw technical capability, cloud services bring important management capabilities for wrangling big geospatial data. Flexible storage tiers balance speed and cost. Automated provisioning spins up resources to meet spikes in processing demand. Access controls secure sensitive data while facilitating sharing between project teams and partners. Usage monitoring provides transparency into resource utilization and spending.

Key Cloud Services for Geospatial Data

Cloud Storage

Cloud storage offers durable, scalable data storage for massive files and geospatial datasets. Object storage services like Amazon S3 and Azure Blob Storage can scale to exabytes of data across billions of files. Geo-redundant configurations enhance durability and availability. Services like Google Cloud Storage offer multi-regional buckets close to computation facilities for reduced data movement.

Cloud storage supports hosting gigantic geospatial files in common formats like GeoTIFFs and LAZ point clouds. It also handles storing raw sensor data, processed derivatives, and non-geospatial assets in an analysis workflow. Robust access controls and audit logs track data usage across users and systems.

Cloud Compute

Elastic cloud compute provides the processing capability to transform big geospatial data into timely insights. Services like AWS Batch, Google Compute Engine, and Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets allow analysts to launch clusters of hundreds or thousands of cores to power through processing backlogs and accelerate repetitive workflows.

Preconfigured virtual machines streamline launching geospatial tools like ERDAS Imagine, Esri ArcGIS Pro, geospatial Python notebooks, and open source stacks. Custom images with GPU support speed deep learning model training. Distributed processing frameworks like Hadoop GeoMesa scale spatial queries and analysis across cloud compute cluster nodes.

Cloud Databases

Scalable cloud databases unlock new capabilities for storing and analyzing big geospatial data. Columnar and in-memory databases like AWS Redshift, Azure SQL Data Warehouse, and Google BigQuery optimize storage and throughput for massively parallel queries across large datasets.

Cloud-native NoSQL databases offer flexible schemas and geospatial indexing to power map-based applications storing billions of GeoJSON features. Managed services like Amazon DynamoDB take database administration burdens off GIS teams’ plates so they can focus on building analytic applications.

Best Practices for Cloud-Based Geospatial Processing

While cloud services provide the raw resources for big geospatial data analytics, organizations need effective strategies for architecting cloud solutions. Key areas to optimize include:

Tiling Large Raster Datasets

Splitting massive geospatial raster datasets like satellite imagery mosaics and LiDAR point clouds into smaller tiles saves storage costs and speeds data access. Tiling schemes balance tile sizes across storage performance, processing overhead, and analysis use cases. Common schemes include quadtree pyramids for spatial hierarchy and mercator grids for web map access.

Optimizing Vector Data for Queries

Targeted indexing of frequently-queried attributes optimizes retrieval of features from massive vector datasets. Columnar storage improves read performance for GIS attribute data. Spatial indexing via quadtrees, grids, or other hierarchical structures accelerates area-of-interest queries. Query optimization and caching further speed response times.

Using Cloud-Optimized GeoFormats

Emerging cloud-optimized formats (COGs) like compact cloud-optimized GeoTIFFs boost performance of geospatial web services while minimizing storage overhead. COGs allow efficient access to subsets of massive raster files, streaming data directly from cloud object storage instead of downloading entire files.

Example Code for Reading Cloud-Hosted GeoTIFFs

Python makes it easy to access and manipulate geospatial data hosted in the cloud…

import rasterio
import boto3
from urllib.parse import unquote_plus

s3 = boto3.client('s3') 

cog_path = 's3://mybucket/image.tif'
rpath = unquote_plus(cog_path)
src = rasterio.open(rpath, 'r')

print(src.profile)
print(src.bounds) 

band1 = src.read(1)

The example above opens a cloud-hosted GeoTIFF from an Amazon S3 bucket for reading metadata and pixel values using Rasterio. The boto3 SDK handles credentials and connectivity while Rasterio interprets the geospatial raster contents. The code could extend to processing routines or writing derived output products back to cloud storage.

Visualizing Geospatial Analytics Results

Interactive dashboards provide critical capabilities for visualizing outputs and gleaning insights from big geospatial data analytics workflows. Cloud visualization tools like Amazon QuickSight, Microsoft Power BI, and Google Data Studio connect directly to data hosted in cloud databases and object storage. Custom web UIs can build from cloud-hosted geospatial vector tiles, 3D scene layers, and dynamically rendered imageoverlays.

Cloud developer services like AWS Amplify, Google Maps Platform, and Azure Maps underpin building robust web applications to visualize geoprocessing results. Combining cloud data and analytics backends with dynamic front-end visualization unlocks communicating location-based insights to both expert and non-technical audiences.

Conclusion: The Future of Massive Geospatial Data in the Cloud

The cloud provides the scalable, flexible data and computing foundation for organizations to harness massive geospatial data sources that were recently out of reach. As sensors continue exponential improvement curves and computational power grows, expects cloud-based analysis of geospatial big data to become standard practice across industries including agriculture, insurance, urban planning, disaster response, and earth sciences.

Realizing this potential requires learning new architectures that apply cloud principles to geospatial problems. Best practices will continue evolving as pioneers expose new challenges and create playbooks for managing massive geospatial data and analytics flows in the cloud.