[HN Gopher] Mantle - Serverless Maps Using Lambda or Cloudflare ...
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Mantle - Serverless Maps Using Lambda or Cloudflare Workers
Author : bdon
Score : 56 points
Date : 2022-04-07 18:11 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (protomaps.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (protomaps.com)
| linsomniac wrote:
| The thing that's holding us back on switching fully to OSM maps
| is geocoder data. Any lines on the OSM of geocoding?
| bdon wrote:
| The stack I describe in the post is only for map tiles - Map
| tiles are a good fit for CDNs because the input space is small
| (just Z/X/Y coordinates on a square grid) and thus very
| cacheable.
|
| Geocoding is a very different problem because the input space -
| human language - is much, much larger, and answering queries
| quickly to support features like autocomplete really requires a
| server with hot data in memory.
|
| One of my favorite projects in this space is Pelias
| https://pelias.io which is an open source auto-completing
| geocoder based on OSM plus other open data. It's backed by a
| great team that also runs a business: Geocode Earth
| https://geocode.earth
| juliansimioni wrote:
| (Co-maintainer of Pelias and co-founder Geocode Earth here)
|
| Thanks Brandon for yet another one of your shout outs.
|
| I'd just like to underline one thing you said, Pelias/Geocode
| Earth are based on OSM _plus other data_: that last part is
| pulling a lot of weight.
|
| OSM data is great, in fact the POI data in OSM is best-in-
| class in many parts of the world. But OSM in general doesn't
| have great address coverage. It's very difficult to manually
| map low density rural or suburban areas, as is the preferred
| method with OSM. Bulk address imports are possible, but rare.
| However there are a huge number of local governments that
| publish up to date, relatively complete and accurate address
| lists, and we heavily lean on those for good address
| coverage.
|
| So to anyone looking for a geocoder who has been put off from
| Pelias or Geocode Earth because you saw it uses OSM, give it
| a try anyway. OSM data is a crucial piece of the puzzle, but
| not the only one.
| hampelm wrote:
| > To illustrate the cost savings, every additional 1,000 users
| that load a map on Google Maps costs 7 USD. An additional million
| hits to Cloudflare Workers costs fifteen cents.
|
| That's certainly a selling point!
|
| The whole ecosystem of tools is powerful, this tileserver is a
| great capstone and an interesting commercial model. What is your
| definition of End Product here? Eg if we have an app and website
| under one brand is that two end products or one?
|
| How do updates work? Eg with mapbox or google you just get the
| "latest" data (modulo time it takes them to integrate data), does
| this hook automatically into the latest source?
| bdon wrote:
| > What is your definition of End Product here? Eg if we have an
| app and website under one brand is that two end products or
| one?
|
| One brand with web + mobile app would be one product. To be
| more explicit, a software development consultancy with multiple
| clients would need one license per client.
|
| For updates, you are 100% in control of the data once it is on
| your S3. This means that it won't change from under you, change
| pricing, or disappear. This also means you'll have to
| explicitly copy updates from upstream, and I'm figuring out the
| right cadence for that (likely ~quarterly)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Can Backblaze B2 be paired with Cloudflare for similar effect
| at a lower storage cost? Backblaze does support an S3
| compatible target [1].
|
| [1]
| https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-b2-s3-compatible-
| ap...
|
| EDIT: Thank you for the reply!
| bdon wrote:
| I've tested Backblaze B2 as a storage option, and I found
| that with the level of traffic a typical map backend
| incurs, there were enough 503 errors to cause problems.
| This is an intentional trade-off of the B2 design that
| allows them to set an aggressive price point:
| https://www.backblaze.com/blog/b2-503-500-server-error/
|
| I'm constantly evaluating all of the different deployment
| combinations and new features on cloud providers, so part
| of the service I'm offering is advice for your specific
| provider and this workload.
| dmrotar wrote:
| Looks like a nice offering. For those interested in an even more
| self-service style option -- check out
| https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler. Spin up a high-memory
| spot instance on your favorite cloud provider, run a command, let
| it run a few hours, and now you've got a complete tileset for the
| planet at the cost of a couple of bucks. I'm not affiliated but
| I've been using it for my own project
| (http://www.lumathon.com/map) and I've been very happy.
| bdon wrote:
| Author of post here. One of the cool possibilities here is that
| Planetiler output is just another dataset, provided it's been
| converted to the S3-friendly PMTiles archive format (utility
| here: http://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles)
|
| While Google Maps and MapBox let you customize the appearance
| of vector maps, you can only modify and remove data that
| already exists at a zoom level. A self-hosted solution allow
| products like yours to have 100% custom basemap datasets
| specific to the application, and serve overlay datasets (like
| those made with tippecanoe) through the same system.
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(page generated 2022-04-07 23:01 UTC)