I saw this referenced on Hacker News over the weekend and thought you might find it at least interesting, if you aren't already aware of it.
Intro/demo:
Technical explanation:
Code:
github.com
This is a pretty ingenious approach to building low-cost content delivery for map sites. The article has all the details, but in short: this allows you to store your map tiles in a single static file. That property allows you to better exploit low cost commodity cloud storage (e.g. S3) to host your basemaps. Instead of having to upload, manage, and store tens or hundreds of millions of map tiles, you can just store one compressed file, and the client will seamlessly request byte ranges from that file, more like a video codec. This is done in a way that deduplicates tiles and optimizes for panning and zooming, reducing the number of overall requests. Neat stuff.
Intro/demo:
A free and open source map of the world
Protomaps is an alternative to Map APIs that you run on your own cloud storage.
protomaps.com
Technical explanation:

Code:
GitHub - protomaps/PMTiles: Cloud-optimized + compressed single-file tile archives for vector and raster maps
Cloud-optimized + compressed single-file tile archives for vector and raster maps - GitHub - protomaps/PMTiles: Cloud-optimized + compressed single-file tile archives for vector and raster maps
This is a pretty ingenious approach to building low-cost content delivery for map sites. The article has all the details, but in short: this allows you to store your map tiles in a single static file. That property allows you to better exploit low cost commodity cloud storage (e.g. S3) to host your basemaps. Instead of having to upload, manage, and store tens or hundreds of millions of map tiles, you can just store one compressed file, and the client will seamlessly request byte ranges from that file, more like a video codec. This is done in a way that deduplicates tiles and optimizes for panning and zooming, reducing the number of overall requests. Neat stuff.