Infrastructure Requirements

Infrastructure Requirements for running a Living Atlas

The infrastructure required to run a Living Atlases depends on several factors. The key factors are:

• The number of components beyond the core set of components you wish to run
• Amount of occurrence records you need to index in your system
• The number of spatial layers you wish to incorporate

We recommend the use of cloud infrastructures for Living Atlas installations. This could be a commercial provider (e.g. Amazon EC2, Google Cloud Engine, Microsoft Azure), or a cloud infrastructure within your country operated by an institution.

Basic Installation

A basic installation of the core components with support for up to 20 million records could be a single server with 4-8 CPU, 32GB RAM and SSD storage. Ideally though, we'd recommend running Cassandra and SOLR on separate virtual machines, as both of these components require a reasonable amount of resources.

Recommended Installation for larger installations

For installations requiring the indexing of large amounts of data (over 50 million records and/or indexing of large number of spatial layers), we would recommend a clustered installation. This clustered installation is in use by Australia (75 million records and 500+ spatial layers) and UK (219 million records and 50+ spatial layers).

Core components for a Living Atlas

• Data registry (component name: collectory)
• Occurrence search UI (component name: biocache-hub)
• Occurrence web searces (component name: biocache-service)
• Images service
• Apache SOLR
• Apache Cassandra
• MySQL

Addition components

• Species lists
• Species pages & services

Advanced components

• Spatial services
• Spatial portal

Basic Installation

A basic installation for a project in its initial phases could be a single server

Recommended Installation for larger installations

For installations Clustered