[Osmf-talk] Tiles

[Paul Norman]

On 2023-06-01 1:31 p.m., Steve Coast wrote:
> The OSMF is seeking massive new funding while at the same time 
> operating a global minutely updated tileserver for the entire world to 
> use for free. It's important to note that keeping this updated (for 
> the entire world, for free) is itself painful and expensive compared 
> to caching the tiles.

Several years ago, maintaining the tile service was painful due to 
trying to manage our own CDN over a large number of donated hosts. Since 
early 2021, this has not been the case and it is no longer a headache.

About 10% of the OWG's hosting and hardware budget 
<https://operations.osmfoundation.org/2022/12/31/plan.html> goes towards 
tiles. This is a mix of capital expense for servers; ongoing power, 
space, and network costs; and logging/monitoring costs. Each of those 
categories is very roughly a third. The actual spend is likely to be 
closer to 5% - tile-related costs are likely to come in under budget, 
but other savings might push the percentage back up.

All of the CDN costs and about half the render server costs are 
sponsored, thanks to Fastly, AWS, AARNet, University College London, 
OSUOSL, and Umeå University. If we were paying commercial prices, the 
CDN costs would be a significant portion of our budget, but we're 
getting the service for free.

Time costs are more difficult to tabulate, but because everything is 
well-scripted the tile service doesn't require much sysadmin time.

> Today, bidenlaptopmedia.com, perhaps the United States most visited 
> website in the last 6 hours, is now using OSMF managed tiles for free.

We publish top users of tiles at 
https://planet.openstreetmap.org/tile_logs/, but because the day hasn't 
ended yet, today's numbers aren't out yet. I had a look anyways.

Although their traffic is significant, the load from them is not. They 
are 54th in the US for the last 6 hours, based on backend tiles served, 
our standard measure of load. Odds are that users are viewing a small 
number of areas, so most traffic is being served by the CDN, which costs 
us no resources or sysadmin time.


> Could we rethink this and instead limit tiles to editors, instead of 
> seeking to expand an already free service which has plenty of 
> commercial competition? That way, resources could be used on things 
> that benefit OSM.

The vast majority of use from non-OSM sources is very small websites. To 
restrict access from these sites while allowing JOSM and editing-related 
sites like MapRoulette would require investments in access restricting 
technology which we investigated developing, but decided against because 
it wasn't worth it 
<https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/342#issuecomment-1138148939>. 
Developing this, administering it, and deciding what sites to allow 
would significantly boost the sysadmin time needed. It might also impact 
the willingness of sponsors to donate services, which could boost costs 
significantly and overwhelm any potential savings.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/osmf-talk/attachments/20230601/8c2cc8e6/attachment.htm>