Introducing Mapbox Tiling Service | by Mapbox

Mapbox Tiling Service (MTS) allows processing large data sets into custom vector tile sets, continuously updating the map as the data changes. MTS is now available in public beta to all Mapbox developers as a service for uploading source data with transformation rules called recipes.

Tile sets generated using MTS can then be styled in Studio and combined with other vector tile sets.

Whether mapping 5G coverage, determining the effectiveness of ad campaigns per zip code, analyzing new user registrations per country, or visualizing local events in social apps, or tracking the spread of COVID, MTS is a service that integrates custom data sets at any scale. onto the map faster, cheaper, and with more flexibility and control than ever before. MTS allows developers to focus on application development, not infrastructure mapping.

We first built MTS internally, so we could process +300 million miles of anonymized, aggregated live road telemetry data every day and update our maps in real time. We designed this service not only to process constantly changing big data, but to turn this data into maps that are served to more than 650 million monthly active users — to support the scale of large customers like Facebook, Snap, Weather Channel, Tableau, and Shopify.

Yahoo! Japan uses MTS to create live weather time series visualizations in Japan that update every 5 minutes. Yahoo! Japan recently migrated all their weather maps to MTS so they could focus on improving the core experience of their application and stop worrying about maintaining the mapping infrastructure, and by doing so their team was able to save technical time and money while providing a better experience. for its users.

“By migrating all of our updated weather maps to MTS, we can save engineering time and money while providing a better experience for our users. We are excited to migrate more of our maps to MTS.”

— Soichi Takahashi, Unit Manager at Yahoo! Japan

MTS creates and updates data using distributed and parallel processing, which means data is processed much faster compared to a standard single server setup with similar tools. For example, a global basemap with 30cm precision can be processed in less than 2 hours with MTS, while a similar workload can take several days to process on a single server.

The map style will be more performant if it refers to a smaller set of tiles. MTS has the flexibility of organizing data into multiple vector layers that are ultimately still part of the same set of tiles. This allows for more data on the map, without sacrificing the same data organization benefits of having multiple tiles.

Snap uses MTS to power their Places map on Snap Map, allowing users to discover local businesses and see rich metadata about each place, such as ratings and images. MTS enables Snap to eliminate operational complexity and cut total data processing time from 4 hours to just 15 minutes.

With MTS, it was important to choose an architecture that would deliver unprecedented processing performance while putting control directly into the hands of developers to optimize every aspect of the map, from performance to visual design. This is why we create recipes, JSON documents consisting of configuration options that tell MTS how to process data into vector tiles. Recipes provide options to generate vector tiles such as simplification level, zoom level, geometry pooling, attribute manipulation, etc. See details about all available configuration options in the Recipes reference.

Recipes determine data precision, filter features, and manipulate data using SQL-like statements and Mapbox expression syntax. It provides easy access to cartographic operations such as pooling, aggregation, label pre-collision, and ranking in an easy-to-use form factor to improve map data readability, performance, and design. Similar functionality can be built using utility functions in PostGIS but it lacks scalability.

AllTrails uses MTS to map one of the largest databases of custom hiking trails available to offline users through our SDK.

“MTS enables AllTrails to quickly upload and process thousands of custom trails for our users. Providing our customers with up-to-date information on highly detailed trail maps for hiking, biking and camping adventures around the world couldn’t be easier!”

— James Graham, Head of Engineering at AllTrails

MTS runs on Mapbox’s global platform, enabling data to be immediately available across regions where Mapbox operates and is automatically backed by our regionally redundant auto-scaling caching network, making it seamless to scale, in any geography, with low latency and high throughput.

Multiple regions with dynamic routing make Mapbox’s infrastructure resilient to single data center or region events such as natural disasters and internet infrastructure outages.

Process the data with MTS once, and utilize the data in multiple formats. Once the data is processed by Mapbox, the data is available in vector tiles for on-device map rendering, in addition to other form factors such as static maps, map thumbnails, overview images, legacy GIS clients , and new interfaces (e.g. iOS14 Widgets).

It provides enterprise-level data processing infrastructure and reliability without the need to spend time and money to set up, build, deploy, or maintain it.

With MTS we have abstracted the hard stuff without taking away any control. Plume Labs, uses MTS to power its geographic data store, which monitors global air quality.

“MTS helps Plume Labs get people from A to B in the healthiest way possible. Using MTS, we can update worldwide air pollution data in real-time so our users can avoid pollution hotspots as they walk, run or cycle through their city.”

— Boris Quennehen, Atmospheric Scientist at Plume Labs

With MTS, instead of managing a collection of servers, developers stream data to Mapbox and make enterprise-grade tilesets available to all users on any device in minutes.

Maps are locked and set to private by default, giving developers complete control over who sees the data. Mapbox never accesses customer-created data layers. Security, managed with access tokens, allows developers to control permissions: our management interface allows developers to create, revoke, and monitor tokens. For more information, see our Tokens API documentation. SAML single sign-on is also available to all Mapbox customers, enabling teams with multiple users to collaborate more securely on the platform.

To get started with MTS, we’ve created a library of sample recipes that encapsulate learnings and best practices from early MTS customers like Yahoo! Japan, Snap, AllTrails, T-Mobile, and Plume Labs.

Search for specific use cases and immediately incorporate them into projects, or adapt them. Get started with MTS using our handy CLI utility.