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Why deploy Protomaps on a CDN?

Protomaps is designed for simple CDN deployment, to turn your tilesets from these URLs:

https://s3.mycloudstorage.com/world.pmtiles

To these URLs:

https://tiles.myglobalcdn.com/world/{z}/{x}/{y}.mvt

These 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, 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