[Osmf-talk] Encouraging the expansion of GeoDNS enabled tile serving?

Joseph Reeves iknowjoseph at gmail.com
Thu Nov 15 12:35:08 UTC 2012


Hi all,

I've recently been thinking more than usual about local OSM mirrors in
places far from London; local, independent, mirrors are an option that
people seem to be increasingly using, but I rarely see mention of the Tile
CDN. Is this something we should be encouraging? I've only joined this list
this year, so please excuse me if this has come up before. I had a quick
Google, but saw nothing obvious.

Specifically I was thinking of the example of osmosa.net - they have
provided their own tile rendering and a number of OSM based services
through their site. If, however, they had joined the tile CDN they could be
providing tiles to the region for both their services and others. Of
course, I'm not suggesting that anyone goes and tells osmosa.net how to run
their site, but I think it works as an example. Likewise, if someone was to
start providing OSM services in South America, should they be encouraged to
join the CDN to help improve local OSM access as a whole?

As it stands, Northern Europe still seems to be almost exclusively the
place that OSM tiles get distributed from [0] although I've seen that a
North American server was expected at some point this year [1].

I imagine that server resources are going to be the main reason why you
would not want to join the CDN, although the machine specs are not as
brutal as I was expecting - only bandwidth seems to be the potentially
expensive factor [2].

With Switch2OSM proving so popular, is there an opportunity to promote the
CDN to high volume tile consumers?

Final question: Is there documentation available for the CDN / GeoDNS? I'd
like to read up on this some more.

Thanks, Joseph



[0] http://dns.openstreetmap.org/tile.openstreetmap.org.html
[1] http://blog.osmfoundation.org/2012/03/05/osmf-hardware-update/
[2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Servers/Tile_CDN
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