Vector tiles as a geo-datastore

Building modern geospatial applications using serverless architecture

By: John Branigan

Vector tiles support the rendering, delivery, and data access requirements of the vast majority of map publishing applications. Vector tiles can encode arbitrary data at world scale, render it on a client quickly, and allow you to only pay for the data created, reducing the need to manage complex tiling and application servers.

This is why vector tiles are suitable for hundreds of thousands of customers from T-Mobile, who use them to create detailed nationwide coverage maps, to Yahoo! Japan, who use them to power their minutely updating time series visualizes of weather in Japan, to Plume Labs who uses them to monitor global air quality every 15 minutes.

Vector tiles allow developers to query all metadata, for example being able to calculate proximity and distance, and to easily style their data in Studio. Encoding unique identifiers in the data also allows for joining additional attributes to the data in the tiles, just like a database query.

Reduced overhead and costs

More than 80% of mapping apps on the web can be designed as a single-page JavaScript app using vector tiles as the geo-datastore, all with no infrastructure to manage. This lowers overhead and costs.

Look at the costs of your current mapping application, from cloud infrastructure costs to the hours invested in building and maintaining just the mapping infrastructure. Traditionally, geospatial applications required custom infrastructure to store data, and render and distribute map tiles. All of that infrastructure had to exist before any useful feature could be built on top of the map.

Mapbox Vector Tiles enable customers to focus on building value-added functionality without having to worry about escalating costs as well as scaling and operating complexities. Vector tiles and Mapbox APIs allow all developers, from small GIS development shops, to companies with massive user bases, like Snap and The Weather Channel to build custom geospatial applications.

Get started

To get started, take a look at what some of our customers are building with vector tiles today.