Architectural considerations
Cost optimization opportunities are realized automatically with AWS built-in features such as S3 Intelligent-Tiering, and the Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 auto-scaling improvements made in April 2022. As cloud technology and hardware improve, the compute cost of a given workload continues to go down. When coupled with AWS Lambda to modernize from traditional virtual servers, the cost of a well-architected enterprise GIS environment is a fraction of what it was a decade ago.
During the Athena setup and configuration topic, it was noted that Amazon Athena has the capability to connect to non-AWS databases – even those on-premises. While technically possible, it should be noted that latency can be the enemy of a highly distributed GIS environment. Access between two endpoints on a low-latency, high-bandwidth network is always going to outperform the alternative. To mitigate performance surprises, a network landscape architecture should be reviewed...