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/myvectordata/{z}/{x}/{y}.mvt
https://tiles.myglobalcdn.com/myrasterdata/{z}/{x}/{y}.png
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.