Design, implement, and operate enterprise systems with ArcGIS that meet your organization's business needs.
Get started
Learn about the mission behind the ArcGIS Well-Architected Framework and characteristics of ArcGIS as an information system.
About the ArcGIS Well-Architected Framework
The ArcGIS Well-Architected Framework is intended to help organizations design, implement, and operate ArcGIS as an enterprise system. Working in today’s IT landscape requires context, expertise, and collaboration.
New to ArcGIS? Learn about the characteristics of ArcGIS as an information system, how it’s designed, how it supports different deployment and operational models, and how it aligns with your IT landscape.
The process of designing systems with ArcGIS is informed by a variety of topics, concepts and technologies. This section provides an overview of the architecture process, suggestions on approaching complex topics, and software selection as a part of solution design.
These common patterns are geospatial in nature, support multiple deployment models, and are not specific to any one industry or market segment.
Location services
Deliver ready-to-use, location-based services for enterprise-wide and/or public use. Includes basemaps, places, geocoding, routing, and spatial analytics, or support for custom location data services.
Deliver web or mobile apps to enterprise and/or public stakeholders while adhering to rigid technical requirements and SLAs for areas like reliability, performance, and scalability.
Support editing and managing authoritative, structured data within your organization with traditional desktop editing and modern implementations of web and mobile editing through a services-based architecture.
Support cataloging, querying, and rendering imagery for enterprise use cases, with access through web services and on-the-fly processing supporting visualization, exploitation, and analysis.
Enable field data collection, editing, and operations using native applications, mobile databases, and web-based data synchronization technology. Also used for situational awareness, navigation, and decision support in the field.
Best practices, deployment considerations, and design recommendations for enterprise systems, grouped into six focus areas and applicable to any system or project.
Automation
ArcGIS supports a variety of automation approaches, from infrastructure and software deployment to DevOps automation, workflow management and webhooks.
ArcGIS has been designed and architected to support the shared goals of easy integration, broad standards-based interoperability, and a robust set of extensibility options across web, desktop, mobile and server-based patterns.
Observability provides ready access to consistent, detailed information about system operations, so that system changes or issues can be rapidly identified, assessed, and acted upon by the supporting teams.
ArcGIS components and workflows scale in different ways, and understanding the available options is important in both the design and operation phases for a system. Measuring performance accurately and tracking changes also contributes to user satisfaction with a system or set of workflows.
Designing systems for reliability often includes considerations for high availability, backups, disaster recovery and monitoring. This section covers different approaches to achieving a reliability that meets organizational demand.
Security is an essential consideration for all IT systems, and especially enterprise systems with extensive use across many users or business processes.
Architecture examples, videos, guides, articles, and tools to assist in designing and implementing well-architected systems with ArcGIS.
NEW
About reference architectures
Reference architectures are blueprints that bring together one or more system patterns, a deployment model, and pillar-based design considerations for a specific type of industry system.
A test study is a comprehensive examination and evaluation of a system's functionality, performance, and end-user experience to determine whether it meets specified requirements and operates as expected.