Geoprocessing in the Microsoft Cloud Computing Platform - Azure

Geoprocessing functions are important for discovering hidden and useful geospatial information, and are widely used in Earth science modeling and applications. The growth of the Web has resulted in the Web-based sharing of large volumes of distributed geospatial data and computational resources. Processing heterogeneous and distributed data into information requires a powerful, scalable, and interoperable information infrastructure. The emergence of Cloud Computing technology brings a new computing Information Technology (IT) infrastructure to general users. Using these Cloud Computing platforms, typical IT resources such as storage, computing utilities, and database are available as services. This paper presents an implementation of geoprocessing service that integrates geoprocessing functions and Microsoft Cloud Computing technologies to provide geoprocessing capabilities in a distributed environment. The integration combines the conventional powerful geospatial analysis functions with the scalable Cloud Computing technology to provide Web-based geoprocessing functionalities. Challenges and approaches on the integration are discussed. The implementation is demonstrated in the Microsoft Cloud Computing Platform – Azure.