Protomaps is designed for simple CDN deployment, to turn your tilesets from these URLs:
https://s3.mycloudstorage.com/world.pmtilesTo these URLs:
https://tiles.myglobalcdn.com/myvectordata/{z}/{x}/{y}.mvt
https://tiles.myglobalcdn.com/myrasterdata/{z}/{x}/{y}.pngThese installation guides should take less than one hour to deploy.
Advantages
Serve tilesets to the web securely from private storage buckets.
Cache tiles at the edge for the fastest response to users, taking advantage of global CDN presence. Single-region buckets can have multi-second latencies for users far away; CDN cache hits can respond in 100 millisconds or less.
Backwards compatibility with existing map clients that use Z/X/Y map URLs.
Affordable costs at scale. There are no servers to maintain for AWS and Cloudflare deployments, and you pay nothing if there's no traffic.
Components
A CDN deployment of Protomaps has three parts:
The data: a storage bucket containing PMTiles archives.
A serverless function that decodes incoming URLs into ranges and returns the tile bytes.
A edge network that caches the responses from serverless functions.
Next steps
- Deploy PMTiles on Cloudflare
- Deploy PMTiles on AWS
- Deploy PMTiles on Google Cloud (GCP)
- Deploy PMTiles with the Caddy web server
Deployment Comparison Chart
Cloudflare is recommended for budget minded beginners. AWS is recommended for commercial companies who require a faster map and/or can offset increased marginal cost with monetization.
| feature | static pmtiles | Cloudflare | AWS | GCP, Azure | Caddy | pmtiles serve |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Z/X/Y compatible | ✖️ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Edge caching | ✖️ | ✅ | ✅ | With CDN | With CDN | With CDN |
| SSL | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | With reverse proxy |
| Scale to zero | ✅ | $5 (USD) | ✅ | ✅ | ✖️ | ✖️ |
| Setup effort | 😓 | 😓 | 😓 | 😓😓 | 😓😓 | 😓😓😓 |
| Latency | 🚀 | 🚀 | 🚀🚀🚀 | 🚀🚀🚀 | 🚀🚀 | 🚀🚀🚀 |
| Cost | 💰 | 💰 | 💰💰💰 | 💰💰💰 | 💰💰 | 💰💰 |
Feature explanation
- Z/X/Y compatible: Can tiles be requested as standard web mapping zoom, x, y tile coordinates?
- Edge caching: Includes easy to configure edge network for content distribution (or manually paired with CDN) to achieve faster latency?
- SSL: Supports encrypted link between tile server and client map library?
- Scale to zero: Does the serverless function scale to zero cost during periods of low usage?
- Setup effort: Developer time to configure complete cloud tile serving solution, less effort 😓 is better than more 😓😓😓 effort
- Latency: Speedy maps tiles 🚀🚀🚀 load in ≤ 200 ms in the client for customers, slow tiles 🚀 load ≥ 500 ms
- Cost: Total cost to run tile serving system, with 💰 being cheaper at $5 USD and 💰💰💰 more expensive options that including storage egress and/or CDN bandwidth costs to achieve lower latency