In order to meet market demands and driven by technological advances, SuperMap has developed cloud-native GIS2.0 based on the architecture and capabilities of cloud-native GIS1.0. In summary, it includes five key technologies: GIS micro-service, GIS containerization, GIS automatic orchestration, GIS service Mesh, and serverless GIS.
GIS Microservices
GIS microservices are an approach to split the traditional complex single application into a number of service modules that can run independently. Each module focuses on a single business function to provide services, and can be independently arranged and deployed. Communicating with each other through lightweight interaction mechanism, those modules can also be combined as a whole to provide complete GIS services.
GIS Containerization
GIS containerization means that the deployment method of GIS is changed from a virtual machine to a container, and the split GIS micro-services are provided in the form of container operation by using containerization technology. Different from the virtualization of the virtual machine at hardware level, the container is the virtualization at the operating system level. All containers share the host kernel and can run more container services under the same configuration. Containers occupy less space and are lighter; as it is quicker to start containers, the deployment is more efficient; their performance is close to the local process of the host machine, thus the loss is smaller. At the same time, containerization realizes the isolation of microservices and their dependencies from the underlying infrastructure by encapsulating all contents into a separate image package, thereby representing good portability and ensuring the consistency of the environment.
GIS Automatic Orchestration
It refers to the use of Kubernetes as a management tool for GIS microservices during the deployment to automatically orchestrate GIS containers. This helps realize rapid deployment of multi-node GIS environment, and microservice-based elastic scaling and fault recovery in response to access pressure.
GIS Service Mesh
GIS Service Mesh is a software infrastructure layer used to control GIS microservice access and monitor service traffic. It provides service measurement, service tracking, access control, and grayscale release. Service metrics can be used to evaluate the communication quality of each service; with the help of service tracking, it is possible to visually track abnormalities that occur during service; through access control, access rights between any two services can be set freely; and grayscale publishing makes GIS application systems upgrading smoother and more stable.
Serverless GIS
GIS serverless computing (Serverless GIS) decouples the computing logic of GIS microservices into finer-grained functional computing units, deploying GIS applications on the cloud in the form of functions, which can be executed, expanded, and billed on-demand to achieve finer-grained computing services without the need to operate and maintain management servers. GIS serverless computing further decouples the computing logic of spatial analysis micro-services into more than a dozen fine-grained GIS functions that can be independently executed and scaled, achieving stronger elasticity and toughness.
