How CARTO generates and serves map tiles in the cloud-native era

CARTO's approach to tile generation has evolved over the past decade from relying on dedicated rendering infrastructure to leveraging the power of cloud data warehouses for dynamic and pre-generated tilesets. This shift allows for direct querying of data warehouses like BigQuery, Snowflake, or Redshift, eliminating the need for intermediate databases or ETL processes. Dynamic Tiling queries the data warehouse for updated data every time a tile is requested, ensuring real-time map updates, while pre-generated tilesets are used for large datasets to enhance performance by storing computed tiles in the data warehouse. Performance measurement has improved as well, with transparency provided by data warehouse tools rather than manual log parsing, and caching strategies further optimize the efficiency of tile generation. The choice between dynamic and pre-generated tilesets depends on dataset size, update frequency, and performance needs, with spatial indexing strategies like H3 or Quadbin aiding in efficient visualization and aggregation. This transformation underscores the importance of data warehouse query performance in delivering fast, scalable, and accurate map tiles.

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