Amazon Location Service
aws.amazon.com
aws.amazon.com
https://github.com/pelias/pelias
Pelias does geocoding (turns addresses, POIs, and administrative regions into coordinates), reverse geocoding (given coordinates, finds nearby POIs, addresses, neighborhood, city, county, state, country), full-text search, and autocompletion. You can also import CSV to use your own custom data.
I run it on an extra PC, where it powers about 20 twitter bots that turn lat/lon coordinates of aircraft into descriptions like "flying over Silver Lake, Los Angeles, 0.5 miles from Circus Liquor."
There are docker configs for the whole-planet DB as well as various countries or metro areas if you don't need the whole Earth. https://github.com/pelias/docker/tree/master/projects
https://github.com/pelias/docker/tree/master/projects/north-...
(Building the db typically takes more resources than just running the services using the db.)
Co-maintainer of Pelias here so I'll chime in with some more background info.
Pelias came out of Mapzen which (sadly) shut down about 3 years ago, but we had a great team of people working on it for 4 years before that, and the project has continued to grow since then. We have contributions from my company, Geocode Earth, which I plugged in another thread so I won't repeat, other contributors like Jawg(https://www.jawg.io/), and of course individuals and teams from many other places.
The core architecture uses Elasticsearch, Node.js, SQLite and some Go to build a fully featured, modular geocoder.
Geocoding is both a fascinating and incredibly frustrating challenge so we are always looking for more people reporting bugs and contributing fixes or other improvements. We truly believe a quality geocoder can't be built outside the large bankrolls of Google, etc without growing a strong open-source community around it.
Mapbox serves all of its customers’ vector tiles through AWS CloudFront.
Is this a possible case of Amazon seeing Mapbox’s traffic numbers, being able to estimate revenue based on pricing/the number of average tiles loaded per map session, and deciding that it was worth to take a plunge?
(There might have been other factors too but — was this /not/ a factor?)
To be very (... paranoid doesn’t feel like the right word), wouldn’t Amazon also have info in the same way on Mapbox’s largest customers and know who to pursue/target first for their new service?
i.e. using Amazon Location with the v2 Mapbox GL JS would also require paying Mapbox for every map load, or you'd need to use the pre v2 version (the last "Open Source one") of the Mapbox GL JS library, correct?
EDIT: as pointed by @kylebarron below, Amazon specifically mentions "Amazon Location supports open source versions of Mapbox GL JS (v1.13.0 or earlier)." [2] which is the last Open Source version.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25347310
[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/location/latest/developerguide/t...
[2] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/location/latest/developerguide/t...
[0]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/location/latest/developerguide/t...
"Amazon Location supports open source versions of Mapbox GL JS (v1.13.0 or earlier)."
Cheers
Edited to say: and of course it runs on OpenStreetMaps
While you _can_ use the OSM's tile servers, they offer no guarantees: https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/
They also have ongoing operational problems/expenses from people using their tile servers, and it's possible that they will one day break you in order to keep their own site functioning.
I've always used MapBox free tier for tiles (which I believe may be changing) so this could be a good alternative for that
Should add that I wanted to self host mostly for privacy. This project I'm working on I'm trying really hard to have no external requests and everything privacy respecting. Unfortunately I really need maps on it and none of the providers I've seen are either in budget or have a compatible privacy policy.
I can't remember what I used, but I built a Docker image in the end.
I used this tutorial https://www.linuxbabe.com/ubuntu/openstreetmap-tile-server-u...
If like me you have basic Linux skills it's not that hard, just time consuming.
However the resources needed are quite consequent: I managed to load all Europe tiles on a Core i7 3770k / 32 GB ram / 1 TB SSD workstation.
I think it took 2+ days to load data into Postgres and many more days to render tiles zoom 0 to 18 for France. I estimate that to run a world tile server you would need as many core as possible, at least 64 GB of ram and 2 TB of disk (SSD is mandatory here).
I didn't experiment with updating the DB with new OSM data but it looks quite a chore.
I guess this is what he was referring to.
"Tim Hortons' parent company, Toronto-based Restaurant Brands partners with Radar Labs, a Brooklyn, N.Y.-based company , which provides location-based data analytics, and helps the Tims app to identify when users are near competing fast-food restaurants and coffee shops."
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-privacy-wat...
This hardly seems like an issue with the underlying API.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2018/12/04/burger-king-...
I wonder why not use the HERE or Esri APIs directly? Is this just a marketing gimmick so Amazon can complete their offering?
Don't know why people are downvoting. This is SOP at Amazon. You want to blame me for Amazon's reputation? You want to blame cnbc? What the fuck, fuckers.
They also have some interesting indoor location/mapping stuff I've read about but not used in anger, which seems to be quite promising too. The ability to map and locate phones in multi story buildings including getting each floor right with individual floorplans is not a trivial thing to get right. Their docs, at least, make it seem like they know how to solve that for you.
I am curious about the quality though. It seems like they're just reselling from 3rd party data providers. Hopefully, we see this forcing price cuts to Google's Maps API at some point, but I think it will be a while until they reach parity in data quality.
I'd much rather have a service that I just pay for and I can then use however I want.
When Apple maps first came out, it was terrible. Now it's actually pretty solid - I've heard Apple is very actively contributing to try and really solidify their maps data, but I wonder if the personnel requirements make this an expensive proposition in the first place...
Also interesting to see them use Mapbox as an example of an open source library that can be used with this. They obviously haven't been paying attention this past week.
------------ kylebarron 8 hours ago [–]
That's why they point to Mapbox GL JS v1 in the script tag [0] [0]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/location/latest/developerguide/t...
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Um.. It ties you to AWS as the single provider of this API.
I look forward to taking a look at it. Other products I have used were complex.
Scroll down to see it.
No idea why Amazon always hides their service pricing on completely different pages.
A baseline "free usage" everyone always gets and then if you go over, you pay, would be so much easier to understand. I understand it's not in Amazon's financial interests to make such a change but it always leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.
I don't have great handle on the number of tiles per map, but I wouldn't be surprised if my more complicated maps don't have o(100) tile loads per session.
On the other hand, a managed geoserver replacement would be worth a significant premium.
Excited to try this out, but it would be great if AWS could also support GIS libraries on Amazon Linux 2. C.f.: https://github.com/aws/elastic-beanstalk-roadmap/issues/28
Without this feature, AWS is basically only enabling half of what's needed to build location-based apps.
They have the infrastructure to create a very compelling imagery dataset from their combination of Amazon Air, and Amazon Prime Air (drone delivery).
Google flies planes to capture cities for Google Earth, but none of the other mapping companies are regularly capturing this data as part of their everyday business.
I know someone is going to say "yeah, but you have to fly vertical and horizontal paths across cities to capture all the data", but I think that is a current limitation which will be resolved with large amounts of data and ML/AI.
Joking aside, this is cool, pricing is good. Hopefully the mobile SDK provides more features than Google Maps'.
[0]: https://registry.opendata.aws/sentinel-2/ [1]: https://registry.opendata.aws/sentinel-2-l2a-cogs/ [2]: https://registry.opendata.aws/landsat-8/ [3]: https://registry.opendata.aws/naip/
I was always wondering why google concurrent don't use OSM, the quality is better than here and they would benefit a lot from OSM to compete against google.
I don't understand why microsoft doesn't use OSM for bing map to replace their shitty map and why facebook doesn't use OSM to display map.
I ended up spinning up a self-hosted tile server, which I used for new projects unrelated to my website or its data.
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2020/07/cloudfron...
A client used an IP to country service until we realized that we already had the information they needed in the Cloudfront headers.
For one, the latency requirements are much more strict. People type fast and if results don't come in within about 100ms or so, the interface doesn't feel responsive. We spend a ton of time ensuring our servers are as fast as possible. There's always more work to do here, since obviously network latency matters, so where your servers are matters too.
Second, the queries themselves are much harder. If someone has typed "India", did they want the country? Or have they not yet finished typing Indiana? The answer probably depends on their location, which may not always be available. That's a simple example, obviously there are much more subtle queries that don't always have as clear an answer.
Anyways, we enjoy the challenge of autocomplete and hope to continue to do a better and better job, even after Amazon inevitably releases their own :)
Geofencing, tracking and location is of course key to their own delivery services they are building.
I would be very interested in this if i was still in the transportation and shipping business
For those who may not be familiar with HERE, they're huge on Enterprise, especially in Automotive, logistics but also on public sector.
HERE used to be part of Nokia and used to power their maps application. It's now owned by a wide consortium where the well-known German car making companies still have a majority. They also heavily use HERE maps and location based services, as many other car makers do. Not sure if they still do, but when I left, it was heavily used by Microsoft for Bing maps. Yahoo and Facebook maps were all based on the HERE map data and used many of the the same backend services.
Note: I currently work at AWS and previously worked at HERE but this message is not written on behalf of my current/former employer.