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I'm just finishing spinning up OpenStreetMap servers in EC2 as one of the last stages of our testing, and they look great. We almost went with Mapbox, which is

I'm just finishing spinning up OpenStreetMap servers in EC2 as one of the last stages of our testing, and they look great. We almost went with Mapbox, which is probably a pretty good alternative. But as part of that move I decided to try OSM tiles and I had them up and running in an afternoon via a docker image, created an Ansible role for deploying virtual machines that evening, and had tiles for our region built the next night after tuning some CartoCSS for our needs. We already have our own aerial tiles, built off the free NAIP imagery, and I just went through rebuilding the 2017 NAIP tiles last week to make them higher quality and fix some seam issues. This combination is pretty good and lets us take control of our map tile destiny. References I used in setting things up: https://github.com/zavpyj/osm-tiles-docker https://github.com/zavpyj/osm-tiles-docker https://switch2osm.org/ https://switch2osm.org/ https://ircama.github.io/osm-carto-tutorials/tile-server-ubuntu/ https://ircama.github.io/osm-carto-tutorials/tile-server-ubu...

spapas82 8y ago
I totally recommend hosting your own tile-server using open street map if you have the resources. Creating your own tile-server is not as difficult as it may sound however it is really resource intensive, especially if you want to cover large areas. For a single EU country it shouldn't be that resource intensive. I have set it up on a Centos 7 server using more or less the instructions from here https://switch2osm.org/manually-building-a-tile-server-16-04-2-lts/ https://switch2osm.org/manually-building-a-tile-server-16-04... (yes they are for Ubuntu but you'll get the idea) and everything works great. Even if you don't really need it, I recommend trying it to understand how it works; it has some very intuitive ideas. Beyond the tile server I am also proposing GeoServer (http://geoserver.org http://geoserver.org) for hosting the geo points on the maps (it can integrate with PostGIS and various other datasources and output the geo points in various different formats). You can then use Leaflet (https://leafletjs.com https://leafletjs.com) to actually display the map and points!
- linsomniac 8y ago
  Tile generation wasn't THAT bad. We only cover Colorado and Wyoming, and generating the tiles for those at the zoom levels 5-18 takes around 7 hours to pre-render (using "render_list_geo.pl"). The end result is around 25GB of rendered meta-tiles. Much better than the NAIP aerial imagery, which takes around 3TB for the source data, 280GB for the resulting tiles, and around a full day to generate.
  - linsomniac 8y ago
    Oh, and we are using the mapbox.js viewer rather than leaflet.
    - vinnieman232 8y ago
      Mapbox.js is a leaflet extension to make it easier to use Leaflet with Mapbox services. So you're using both!
  - spapas82 8y ago
    Yes it wasn't bad for a single area (we cover only Greece and it was quick and easy for such a small country). However I couldn't imagine of the resources needed to cover the whole world!
- MattBlissett 8y ago
  The fastest way, if you don't have resources and don't mind being up to a few months behind, is to use OpenMapTiles vector tiles [1]. The download is an SQLite database with a standard-ish structure (MBTiles), you can either write a small server or use theirs. I needed vector tiles in other projections — WGS84 equirectangualar, an Arctic one, and an Antarctic one. Generating those took many hours on a cluster. [1] https://openmaptiles.com/downloads/planet/ https://openmaptiles.com/downloads/planet/
  - voxadam 8y ago
    You mention being "a few months behind", what is the reason for this lag?
    - MattBlissett 8y ago
      My apologies, I'm out-of-date with the commercial offerings of OpenMapTiles — I work on an open data project, eligible for OpenMapTiles' free license which has old (currently one year old) tiles. With a commercial license, the tiles are from 2 July. I assume the commercial tiles are a few days behind as it's just not worth most people's effort to stay up-to-the-hour — different map services can offer that, this company is making easy self-hosted map tile packages. The free license is presumably using older data to encourage an upgrade.
  - wpdev_63 8y ago
    It's not comparable to OSM tiles as it's paid for licencing for commercial use.
    - MattBlissett 8y ago
      That's correct — I'd forgotten that, as my project has the open data use license. However, as an example, the one-time $40 for Colorado is likely to be much cheaper than generating them yourself, and is probably adequate if you don't need to keep up to date.
  - spapas82 8y ago
- gregknicholson 8y ago
  Would it be possible to put Free map tiles in something like DAT or IPFS, to share the load? Kind of like Peertube, but for maps.
  - diggan 8y ago
    For sure, substack did this with peermaps + IPFS, check it out: https://peermaps.github.io/ https://peermaps.github.io/ Source: https://github.com/peermaps/peermaps https://github.com/peermaps/peermaps Also writeup about the architecture: https://github.com/digidem/osm-p2p-db/blob/master/doc/architecture.markdown https://github.com/digidem/osm-p2p-db/blob/master/doc/archit...
  - rmc 8y ago
    If you use vector tiles, and render them client side you could do this. For raster tiles, where you're storing images, there are too many images to do this practically. And then you need to think of how to do data updates. OSM updates minutely.
    - spapas82 8y ago
      Data updates are not required for many applications. You probably don't want to be google maps! For example I haven't updated the OSM data for more than a year and I don't think that there are any problems with the data being stale. It all depends on the application of course. One major advantage of not updating your data very often is that the tile-images won't need to be re-generated thus you save a lot of (CPU intensive) resources! I think that another commenter mentioned that he generated the tiles in a CPU intensive system and then just off-loaded the images to not-so-fast system for serving.
kirbypineapple 8y ago
How does Mapbox stack up against what you've built? Does Mapbox provide any advantages or is are the two not very comparable? How difficult would it be to spin up a Mapbox competitor?
- linsomniac 8y ago
  How does Mapbox stack up against what we've built? Well, they have way more people working on the problem, so there's going to be more support and more eyes on the problem. I didn't directly compare map tiles, that was a couple other people on my team. We decided to try moving forward with our own OSM-based tiles, so the conclusion I've come to is that it compares favorably. How difficult would it be to build a competitor to Mapbox? Well, if all you care about are map tiles, it's no big deal. If you want to build a business around it, that's always work. You're going to need to build the tiles, have infrastructure to serve it, monitoring, staff to manage it, billing and charging infrastructure, etc...
  - kevincennis 8y ago
    Mapbox also offers geocoding and navigation, which are quite a bit more difficult than just setting up a server that can host OSM tiles. Obviously, if all you need are maps, that's fine. But if you need maps with search, which I suspect most people do, rolling your own is tougher (though projects like pelias are pretty good).
    - linsomniac 8y ago
      I set up a pelias system a while ago but it never got any traction. We have another geocoder already set up using Experian QAS data, I think we've had that set up for a decade or more, so that isn't one of our concerns. Good point though.
Zaskoda 8y ago
I only came to the comments to upvote whoever mentioned OpenStreetMaps. It needs our love.
- jseliger 8y ago
  I only came to the comments to upvote whoever mentioned OpenStreetMaps. It needs our love. This is the platform Maps.me is based on, correct? I ask because I downloaded Maps.me the other day, after reading HN, and have found it to be missing most businesses that I've attempted to search for. In addition, there seems to be no obvious way to suggest missing destinations. I too want Google/Apple maps alternatives to succeed, but my limited trial so far has not been promising.
  - mmel 8y ago
    >there seems to be no obvious way to suggest missing destinations. Unless Maps.Me use their own database for business listings, you just edit the map directly from openstreetmap.org or one of the many fat client map editors that are out there.
    - Brakenshire 8y ago
      I don’t think that’s true. Items added on the OSM page appear on maps.me, and items added on maps.me appear on OSM.
  - pwg 8y ago
    > I ask because I downloaded Maps.me the other day, after reading HN, and have found it to be missing most businesses that I've attempted to search for. In addition, there seems to be no obvious way to suggest missing destinations. You might try looking at OsmAnd. It too uses OpenStreetMap data, but it does allow you to add some amount of missing data as well (see https://osmand.net/features?id=osm-editing-plugin https://osmand.net/features?id=osm-editing-plugin). This, of course, is part of the advantage of OpenStreetMap, you notice something missing, you add it, and now it is no longer missing.
bonsai80 8y ago
Thanks for the docker image pointers; just what I was looking form. What kind of traffic volume can you handle on what size VM's?
- linsomniac 8y ago
  We found some references saying that each box could probably handle around 10,000 map tiles per second. Our full tileset is under 30GB, so it is easily cached. One of our machines can generate Tiles at a rate of 2,500/sec, another is 1,300.
  - bonsai80 8y ago
    Oh wow, that's a faster tile generation rate than I was expecting. What are the specs on the machines/VMs you're using to get those rates?
    - linsomniac 8y ago
      They are both virtual machines, 32GB and 32 CPUs for the 1,300/sec and 20CPUs for the 2,500/sec. The 32 cores are on a host machine with two "Intel(R) Xeon(R) Silver 4108 CPU @ 1.80GHz", the 20 cores are "Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2637 v2 @ 3.50GHz". You know, 7,001.21 bogomips (TM). :-)
lxtx 8y ago
You can also prerender the tiles on a powerful machine and host them on a cheap instance (assuming you don't need very large regions). A while ago I created an OSM server (https://github.com/seemk/TileSweep https://github.com/seemk/TileSweep) to do this for me, you can select regions you want to render via a polygon and you get a SQLite database of the tiles. It can also run as an alternative for mod_tile + renderd. I rendered all of Estonia from zoom levels 0 to 18 (~16.5M tiles) which is around 20GB and host the tiles on a cheap DigitalOcean instance.
- coderesearch 8y ago
  * How is the workflow for updating OSM data with this project? * What is the recommended procedure for backup + restore? I find a lot of projects in this space make you go through an manual copy-paste setup process like if it was a one-time thing - it is not - updating OSM data is a crucial part in this process and should be part of it.
  - linsomniac 8y ago
    I haven't investigated updating of data using anything clever. I know the database load script can write out a list of tiles that need to be rerendered, which can be fed into the renderd process. Renderd has multiple priority channel so bulk renders are a lower priority than user views, so a live system can update the tilecache without much easier impact. I haven't investigated it because we are probably moving to Vector tiles over the next month or two, and we don't need up to the minute map updates. On one of our sites, we have been rendering navteq tiles and we only get updates for those quarterly. It was only our public site that we were using Google Maps for. Backup and restore we are just doing via normal backup programs. The tilecache is stored in meta tiles, which is a d duplicated set of 64 tiles in a single file. So we are only dealing with about a million files in a directory structure totaling 25 gigabytes. If we needed to restore or update our tiles, we would probably just spin up a new box and rerun ansible to deploy it. I have it all encoded Within a Playbook.
arendtio 8y ago
I was wondering too why they skipped OpenStreetMap so quickly. Living in Germany, I find the map quality of OSM much better than Google Maps. Sure, it lacks the integration with the other Google services like a good search and live traffic, but speaking about the pure map quality, Google is lacking a lot of detail here.
- Qub3d 8y ago
  From the article (emphasis added): "Which maps should we investigate deeper? Some options we could reject quickly for various reasons. OpenStreetMap is not supposed to be directly used by commercial sites. Apple Maps, even though we wouldn't mind having Apple logo on our site somewhere, was just released as beta and requires Apple developer account to test properly."
  - arendtio 8y ago
    I read that, but compared to the effort they put into analysing the whole issue, at least an estimate about the cost involved in hosting their own server would be a good decision.
  - rmc 8y ago
    The OpenStreetMap.org website doesn't ban commerical sites (per se). The volunteer sysadmins who manage the donated hardware that runs the OpenStreetMap.org website don't offer any SLA and reserve the right to ban people/apps which put too much load on it. If you don't like it, they're prepared to give you a full refund.
- linsomniac 8y ago
  It seems like they rejected OSM because they couldn't directly use the OSM site to serve tiles, but would instead need to host their own infrastructure for it. I understand that, but for us we decided to go ahead and own it.
  - arendtio 8y ago
    I think if the maps service is part of your core product, it is good considering a self hosted solution. Yes, it costs time you want to save as a startup, but at least you control your own product and can manage your cost directly.
coderesearch 8y ago
Thank you very much, may I ask two questions: * what is the workflow to update the OSM data? * what is your recommendation for a good geocoder?
- linsomniac 8y ago
  I answered your questions where you asked it elsewhere in this thread.
- Bedon292 8y ago
  Updating is easy, the tooling built around OSM takes care of all of it. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim is an OK geocoder, definitely worth trying out at least. Though the pay services will definitely be better.

spapas82 8y ago

I totally recommend hosting your own tile-server using open street map if you have the resources. Creating your own tile-server is not as difficult as it may sound however it is really resource intensive, especially if you want to cover large areas. For a single EU country it shouldn't be that resource intensive. I have set it up on a Centos 7 server using more or less the instructions from here https://switch2osm.org/manually-building-a-tile-server-16-04-2-lts/ https://switch2osm.org/manually-building-a-tile-server-16-04... (yes they are for Ubuntu but you'll get the idea) and everything works great. Even if you don't really need it, I recommend trying it to understand how it works; it has some very intuitive ideas. Beyond the tile server I am also proposing GeoServer (http://geoserver.org http://geoserver.org) for hosting the geo points on the maps (it can integrate with PostGIS and various other datasources and output the geo points in various different formats). You can then use Leaflet (https://leafletjs.com https://leafletjs.com) to actually display the map and points!

linsomniac 8y ago
Tile generation wasn't THAT bad. We only cover Colorado and Wyoming, and generating the tiles for those at the zoom levels 5-18 takes around 7 hours to pre-render (using "render_list_geo.pl"). The end result is around 25GB of rendered meta-tiles. Much better than the NAIP aerial imagery, which takes around 3TB for the source data, 280GB for the resulting tiles, and around a full day to generate.
- linsomniac 8y ago
  Oh, and we are using the mapbox.js viewer rather than leaflet.
  - vinnieman232 8y ago
    Mapbox.js is a leaflet extension to make it easier to use Leaflet with Mapbox services. So you're using both!
- spapas82 8y ago
  Yes it wasn't bad for a single area (we cover only Greece and it was quick and easy for such a small country). However I couldn't imagine of the resources needed to cover the whole world!
MattBlissett 8y ago
The fastest way, if you don't have resources and don't mind being up to a few months behind, is to use OpenMapTiles vector tiles [1]. The download is an SQLite database with a standard-ish structure (MBTiles), you can either write a small server or use theirs. I needed vector tiles in other projections — WGS84 equirectangualar, an Arctic one, and an Antarctic one. Generating those took many hours on a cluster. [1] https://openmaptiles.com/downloads/planet/ https://openmaptiles.com/downloads/planet/
- voxadam 8y ago
  You mention being "a few months behind", what is the reason for this lag?
  - MattBlissett 8y ago
    My apologies, I'm out-of-date with the commercial offerings of OpenMapTiles — I work on an open data project, eligible for OpenMapTiles' free license which has old (currently one year old) tiles. With a commercial license, the tiles are from 2 July. I assume the commercial tiles are a few days behind as it's just not worth most people's effort to stay up-to-the-hour — different map services can offer that, this company is making easy self-hosted map tile packages. The free license is presumably using older data to encourage an upgrade.
- wpdev_63 8y ago
  It's not comparable to OSM tiles as it's paid for licencing for commercial use.
  - MattBlissett 8y ago
    That's correct — I'd forgotten that, as my project has the open data use license. However, as an example, the one-time $40 for Colorado is likely to be much cheaper than generating them yourself, and is probably adequate if you don't need to keep up to date.
- spapas82 8y ago
gregknicholson 8y ago
Would it be possible to put Free map tiles in something like DAT or IPFS, to share the load? Kind of like Peertube, but for maps.
- diggan 8y ago
  For sure, substack did this with peermaps + IPFS, check it out: https://peermaps.github.io/ https://peermaps.github.io/ Source: https://github.com/peermaps/peermaps https://github.com/peermaps/peermaps Also writeup about the architecture: https://github.com/digidem/osm-p2p-db/blob/master/doc/architecture.markdown https://github.com/digidem/osm-p2p-db/blob/master/doc/archit...
- rmc 8y ago
  If you use vector tiles, and render them client side you could do this. For raster tiles, where you're storing images, there are too many images to do this practically. And then you need to think of how to do data updates. OSM updates minutely.
  - spapas82 8y ago
    Data updates are not required for many applications. You probably don't want to be google maps! For example I haven't updated the OSM data for more than a year and I don't think that there are any problems with the data being stale. It all depends on the application of course. One major advantage of not updating your data very often is that the tile-images won't need to be re-generated thus you save a lot of (CPU intensive) resources! I think that another commenter mentioned that he generated the tiles in a CPU intensive system and then just off-loaded the images to not-so-fast system for serving.

kirbypineapple 8y ago

How does Mapbox stack up against what you've built? Does Mapbox provide any advantages or is are the two not very comparable? How difficult would it be to spin up a Mapbox competitor?

linsomniac 8y ago
How does Mapbox stack up against what we've built? Well, they have way more people working on the problem, so there's going to be more support and more eyes on the problem. I didn't directly compare map tiles, that was a couple other people on my team. We decided to try moving forward with our own OSM-based tiles, so the conclusion I've come to is that it compares favorably. How difficult would it be to build a competitor to Mapbox? Well, if all you care about are map tiles, it's no big deal. If you want to build a business around it, that's always work. You're going to need to build the tiles, have infrastructure to serve it, monitoring, staff to manage it, billing and charging infrastructure, etc...
- kevincennis 8y ago
  Mapbox also offers geocoding and navigation, which are quite a bit more difficult than just setting up a server that can host OSM tiles. Obviously, if all you need are maps, that's fine. But if you need maps with search, which I suspect most people do, rolling your own is tougher (though projects like pelias are pretty good).
  - linsomniac 8y ago
    I set up a pelias system a while ago but it never got any traction. We have another geocoder already set up using Experian QAS data, I think we've had that set up for a decade or more, so that isn't one of our concerns. Good point though.

Zaskoda 8y ago

I only came to the comments to upvote whoever mentioned OpenStreetMaps. It needs our love.

jseliger 8y ago
I only came to the comments to upvote whoever mentioned OpenStreetMaps. It needs our love. This is the platform Maps.me is based on, correct? I ask because I downloaded Maps.me the other day, after reading HN, and have found it to be missing most businesses that I've attempted to search for. In addition, there seems to be no obvious way to suggest missing destinations. I too want Google/Apple maps alternatives to succeed, but my limited trial so far has not been promising.
- mmel 8y ago
  >there seems to be no obvious way to suggest missing destinations. Unless Maps.Me use their own database for business listings, you just edit the map directly from openstreetmap.org or one of the many fat client map editors that are out there.
  - Brakenshire 8y ago
    I don’t think that’s true. Items added on the OSM page appear on maps.me, and items added on maps.me appear on OSM.
- pwg 8y ago
  > I ask because I downloaded Maps.me the other day, after reading HN, and have found it to be missing most businesses that I've attempted to search for. In addition, there seems to be no obvious way to suggest missing destinations. You might try looking at OsmAnd. It too uses OpenStreetMap data, but it does allow you to add some amount of missing data as well (see https://osmand.net/features?id=osm-editing-plugin https://osmand.net/features?id=osm-editing-plugin). This, of course, is part of the advantage of OpenStreetMap, you notice something missing, you add it, and now it is no longer missing.

bonsai80 8y ago

Thanks for the docker image pointers; just what I was looking form. What kind of traffic volume can you handle on what size VM's?

linsomniac 8y ago
We found some references saying that each box could probably handle around 10,000 map tiles per second. Our full tileset is under 30GB, so it is easily cached. One of our machines can generate Tiles at a rate of 2,500/sec, another is 1,300.
- bonsai80 8y ago
  Oh wow, that's a faster tile generation rate than I was expecting. What are the specs on the machines/VMs you're using to get those rates?
  - linsomniac 8y ago
    They are both virtual machines, 32GB and 32 CPUs for the 1,300/sec and 20CPUs for the 2,500/sec. The 32 cores are on a host machine with two "Intel(R) Xeon(R) Silver 4108 CPU @ 1.80GHz", the 20 cores are "Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2637 v2 @ 3.50GHz". You know, 7,001.21 bogomips (TM). :-)

lxtx 8y ago

You can also prerender the tiles on a powerful machine and host them on a cheap instance (assuming you don't need very large regions). A while ago I created an OSM server (https://github.com/seemk/TileSweep https://github.com/seemk/TileSweep) to do this for me, you can select regions you want to render via a polygon and you get a SQLite database of the tiles. It can also run as an alternative for mod_tile + renderd. I rendered all of Estonia from zoom levels 0 to 18 (~16.5M tiles) which is around 20GB and host the tiles on a cheap DigitalOcean instance.

coderesearch 8y ago
* How is the workflow for updating OSM data with this project? * What is the recommended procedure for backup + restore? I find a lot of projects in this space make you go through an manual copy-paste setup process like if it was a one-time thing - it is not - updating OSM data is a crucial part in this process and should be part of it.
- linsomniac 8y ago
  I haven't investigated updating of data using anything clever. I know the database load script can write out a list of tiles that need to be rerendered, which can be fed into the renderd process. Renderd has multiple priority channel so bulk renders are a lower priority than user views, so a live system can update the tilecache without much easier impact. I haven't investigated it because we are probably moving to Vector tiles over the next month or two, and we don't need up to the minute map updates. On one of our sites, we have been rendering navteq tiles and we only get updates for those quarterly. It was only our public site that we were using Google Maps for. Backup and restore we are just doing via normal backup programs. The tilecache is stored in meta tiles, which is a d duplicated set of 64 tiles in a single file. So we are only dealing with about a million files in a directory structure totaling 25 gigabytes. If we needed to restore or update our tiles, we would probably just spin up a new box and rerun ansible to deploy it. I have it all encoded Within a Playbook.

arendtio 8y ago

I was wondering too why they skipped OpenStreetMap so quickly. Living in Germany, I find the map quality of OSM much better than Google Maps. Sure, it lacks the integration with the other Google services like a good search and live traffic, but speaking about the pure map quality, Google is lacking a lot of detail here.

Qub3d 8y ago
From the article (emphasis added): "Which maps should we investigate deeper? Some options we could reject quickly for various reasons. OpenStreetMap is not supposed to be directly used by commercial sites. Apple Maps, even though we wouldn't mind having Apple logo on our site somewhere, was just released as beta and requires Apple developer account to test properly."
- arendtio 8y ago
  I read that, but compared to the effort they put into analysing the whole issue, at least an estimate about the cost involved in hosting their own server would be a good decision.
- rmc 8y ago
  The OpenStreetMap.org website doesn't ban commerical sites (per se). The volunteer sysadmins who manage the donated hardware that runs the OpenStreetMap.org website don't offer any SLA and reserve the right to ban people/apps which put too much load on it. If you don't like it, they're prepared to give you a full refund.
linsomniac 8y ago
It seems like they rejected OSM because they couldn't directly use the OSM site to serve tiles, but would instead need to host their own infrastructure for it. I understand that, but for us we decided to go ahead and own it.
- arendtio 8y ago
  I think if the maps service is part of your core product, it is good considering a self hosted solution. Yes, it costs time you want to save as a startup, but at least you control your own product and can manage your cost directly.

coderesearch 8y ago

Thank you very much, may I ask two questions: * what is the workflow to update the OSM data? * what is your recommendation for a good geocoder?

linsomniac 8y ago
I answered your questions where you asked it elsewhere in this thread.
Bedon292 8y ago
Updating is easy, the tooling built around OSM takes care of all of it. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim is an OK geocoder, definitely worth trying out at least. Though the pay services will definitely be better.