It has been a while since my last update, so I wanted to share some news about what has been happening behind the scenes. Rikitraki has been running quietly and reliably since 2016, and over the past few months I’ve been working on something that has been on my mind for a long time: a full refresh of the backend. The original system — a Node/Express app running on a dedicated VM with MongoDB — served amazingly well for almost a decade.

On this post, I describe the approach used by the Provita Geoportal to pre-generate map preview tiles using a serverless approach.

Why pre-generate tiles?

Traditionally, map tiles are generated dynamically (and cached) using a GIS server. This requires installation, monitoring and maintenance of some server capability, whether it is a physical server somewhere, a hosted virtual machine, or perhaps a container image hosted in some cloud service provider. A solution like this would most likely require hosting database management system as well. And we don’t want any of that!

This is a follow up to my earlier post discussing the design of a Geoportal for Provita. In that post, I mentioned that we use the serverless JAMStack approach, with no servers and no databases to monitor and maintain.

So, “without” servers or databases, how are we organizing and managing the data of the site?

In this post, I answer the question by describing the data organization and the storage aspects of the Geoportal.

Over the past few months, I have been working on a cool new project for the Provita folks.

Provita wants to maintain and publish a collection of geospatial data sets to enable researchers, 3rd party organizations, and casual users to have access to up-to-date Geographical Information Systems (GIS) data for supporting ecology, biodiversity, and environmental protection applications, studies and analyses.

In this post, I introduce key project requirements and the overall design of the app.