The typical way to build and distribute Mapbox vector tiles has been by packing them into a sqlite database with individual rows for each Z/X/Y quad tree coordinate. This is what tools like tippecanoe typically produce.

The problem with this is it still requires a running server process colocated with that sqlite db in order to service requests for individual tiles, like what you'll receive from a client-side mapping library.

This project has a lot of different parts, but one of them is a spec for serving this type of data at low latency without a server by combining a custom packing format with S3 range-get requests to read individual tiles direct from blob storage. So that is certainly interesting for this kind of use-case.

OP author here; one thing I didn't touch on is the way that most map services license their basemap data explicitly disallows "caching" which would be inclusive of hosting basemaps yourself on your own storage. So for the cases where it makes engineering or product sense to have your maps on S3, it goes against the dominant map business model.

Is this a simple process? Can you share a link to how this is done, I'm interested. I always assumed it was fairly complicated.