Pillars

Best practices and successful approaches for each of the six ArcGIS architecture pillars.

Architecture pillars

Best practices and design recommendations organized into six focus areas and applicable to any ArcGIS system.
Reliability
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.
Performance and scalability
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.
Security
Security is an essential consideration for all IT systems, and especially enterprise systems with extensive use across many users or business processes.
Integration
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.
Automation
ArcGIS supports a variety of automation approaches, from infrastructure and software deployment to DevOps automation, workflow management and webhooks.
Observability
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.

Library resources

Resources related to the architecture pillars in the Architecture Library cover specific deployment guidance, examples of implementation patterns, and links to relevant external content, along with case studies and reference architectures.
View all library resources
ArcGIS Enterprise Hardening Guide
This guide describes strategies and associated settings that can be implemented to improve the security posture of ArcGIS Enterprise 11.1 or higher deployments...
ArcGIS Monitor: Operational Scenarios
This video covers advanced techniques used to resolve common operational scenarios related to health, performance, and usage of your ArcGIS Enterprise implementation...
ArcGIS Enterprise: Extending, Automating, and Integrating
Learn about a variety of tools and approaches for extending, automating, and integrating ArcGIS Enterprise through different extensibility points and methods....
Automation Tools for Microsoft Windows PowerShell DSC
This repository contains scripts, code and samples for automating the install and configuration of ArcGIS (Enterprise and Desktop) using Microsoft Windows...
Top