This article was written regarding work conducted under legacy company names: Continental Mapping, GISinc, or TSG Solutions. These three companies merged in January 2021 to form a new geospatial leader Axim Geospatial.
When Great Lakes Water Authority (GLWA) recently upgraded its GIS capabilities, it saw the need to establish a cloud-based disaster recovery solution. Working with GLWA, Axim Geospatial designed an Amazon Web Services-based (AWS) environment to meet their needs.
In designing and implementing the system, data availability in the AWS ecosystem was paramount. Enterprise-level SQL Server log shipping was utilized to provide geodatabase high availability and required the transfer of SQL transaction logs from the local GLWA environment up to AWS.
To get transaction logs up to AWS, FTP was first researched and tested but found to be less secure and performant than necessary. Python scripting combined with Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) was found to be a secure, robust, and cost-effective solution for transferring data quickly and easily up to the AWS cloud.
