Last month I had the opportunity to present the architecture behind tiles.rdnt.io: Customer Showcase: Exploiting Multi-Region Data Locality with Lambda@Edge — AWS Online Tech Talks.tiles.rdnt.io is interesting for a few reasons: 1) it dynamically renders map tiles for imagery sources anywhere on the internet, 2) it’s entirely serverless — the tiler itself is implemented as a Python Lambda function, and 3) it’s replicated worldwide to reduce latency when rendering and network egress costs for imagery providers.

A couple of weeks ago, the core SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) community gathered in San Francisco (and virtually) to advance the ecosystem and specification, in our fourth in-person sprint. We decided to focus more on the tools and data this time, dedicating the first day to building catalogs and software. Since the start of STAC, there have been two milestones that I’ve been dreaming of — a QGIS plugin and an interactive Javascript image browser; and amazingly, we had huge progress on both, which are now available for everyone.