Case Study: swisstopo (Swiss Federal Office of Topography) achieves rapid, scalable GIS deployment and 1M monthly users with Amazon Web Services

Swisstopo - Customer Case Study

swisstopo, the Swiss Federal Office of Topography, is Switzerland’s national mapping agency responsible for geographic reference data and GIS projects. Its Federal Spatial Data Infrastructure (FSDI) team managed more than 100 servers and many small-to-medium web GIS projects but was constrained by limited on‑premises capacity, a weak internet uplink and long hardware procurement cycles that hindered timely delivery.

swisstopo migrated major parts of the FSDI to AWS—using Amazon EC2, EBS, S3, CloudFormation, Elastic Load Balancing, Puppet, Varnish and Tileforge—to enable elastic, automated provisioning and scalable tile production. The move reduced server launch times from weeks/months to under an hour, supports about 100 EC2 instances and storage for roughly 1 billion map tiles (50 TB EBS/10 TB S3), serves about 1 million users per month and streamlined cost allocation, standardization and operations—helping earn international recognition.

Swisstopo

Hanspeter Christ

Deputy Head, FSDI Web Infrastructure