In my last post, I described the downsides of the existing “pay-as-you-go” business model for maps. Organizations searching for a map solution weigh the benefits and drawbacks of build vs. buy. Buying a hosted SaaS — and letting someone else manage infrastructure for you — makes sense when DIY map infrastructure looks like this diagram:

In this post, I’ll introduce Mantle, the commercial offering of the Protomaps system. It’s the same backend that powers the interactive Leaflet maps on this site, like at Protomaps Downloads. It enables scalable hosting of map data with two moving parts:

Runs in your own cloud account#

Mantle is a commercial product bundling the open source components of the Protomaps ecosystem into a planet-scale, deployment-friendly solution for organizations.

It has a mere two components:

• A serverless app that runs on either AWS Lambda @ Edge or Cloudflare Workers.
• A global basemap vector tile dataset derived from OpenStreetMap and delivered as a single 62 GB PMTiles archive that lives on S3 or compatible storage.

With this combination, you get near-infinite storage space and scaling, edge caching for low latency, and security with SSL and CORS, powered by your existing cloud account and CDN.

Mantle is not a SaaS#

I’ll emphasize here that this solution is not Software as a Service (SaaS). It is licensed for a flat fee and self-hosted. It lives in your own AWS or Cloudflare account, but involves zero server management, databases or certificates.

The software industry has shifted to hosted services because the diversity of on-premise installation induces fractal complexity. “Serverless” computing offers an elegant path forward: Mantle takes less than an hour to set up in your own account, and deployment of the CDN code is merely pasting