Four reasons to use ArcGIS Notebooks for ArcGIS Online.
Welcome to a new way to automate GIS workflows — Online!
Since the June 2020 update, users can use Jupyter Notebooks on ArcGIS Online. There are three 3 types of notebooks on ArcGIS Online, with different costs models and libraries.
While those are not a silver bullet, they open a lot of doors. There are a lot of reasons why organizations should use them, and so should you. I have listed my top four.
1. You can use the power of ArcGIS Desktop in the cloud.
You no longer need ArcGIS Desktop to call geoprocessing tools or arcpy in Python. With notebooks on ArcGIS Online, users can access the power of ArcGIS Desktop from anywhere. All you need is to create a notebook.
Accessing arcpy on the web can bring a lot of flexibility to your workflows: you can run them from anywhere. It can also save the need to install ArcGIS Desktop. It does consume credits and requires the use of the advanced notebook type. Yet, it can be a very cost-efficient solution. It also removes the need to worry about hardware, infrastructure, and software licensing.
Welcome to a world where you can access arcpy as a service!
2. Standard notebooks don’t consume credits.
Do you need to automate some administrative tasks on ArcGIS Online? Do you need to download some CSV data to update a service? Then standard notebooks are perfectly fine for you. Good news: they don’t consume credits.
The limits are pretty simple: limited compute power and no access to arcpy. Other than that, those notebooks come with more than 300 open source libraries. It includes numpy, pandas, and the Python API for ArcGIS. For the full list of packages, you can access the documentation.
A use case is to bring some data from Web Feature Services (WFS) into ArcGIS Online, at regular intervals. All it takes is some standard libraries and Python API for ArcGIS. Standards notebooks are a perfect fit. You can use one to download the WFS data and update a feature service.
What’s more, you can schedule those notebooks to run at regular intervals thanks to our next point.
3. It comes with a task scheduler.
Some organizations need automated workflows to update content in their ArcGIS Online organization. This is usually solved by creating scripts. Those scripts are then deployed to a machine that has ArcGIS Desktop. A task scheduler is then used to run the job at regular intervals.
This workflow has some underlying requirements. The first one is that the organization needs a machine with an ArcGIS license. The GIS users need privileges on the server to schedule jobs. This is not always easy to meet those conditions, due to IT restrictions.
Notebooks can be run from anywhere. They can also be scheduled and run at regular intervals. Let’s see how to create a scheduled task.
That’s it! We can run our tasks online and monitor them. We can now deploy our Notebooks to a serverless environment. It also saves work as it is a lot easier than deploying that in the client’s environment.
4. It comes with its own file system.
What you get with your ArcGIS Notebook is a container. This container works as a Linux file system. That means that you can use it to download data files and then process them.
In the following example, I have downloaded a file geodatabase on the container. I am then using the notebook to visualize the content of the container using Linux commands.
ArcGIS Notebooks are not the silver bullet. In some cases, it might make more sense to run arcpy using your good old ArcGIS Desktop workstation. In others cases, some cloud programming platforms such as Azure might be a better choice. However, when organizations only have access to ArcGIS Online, Notebooks can be a very good option. It is also very easy to use. Why not giving it a try?
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