Draft technical hand-off documentation to celebrate the end of WMDE Tech Wishes involvement in kartotherian and kartographer. Write this in collaboration with the WMF maps developers and SRE.
- T216826: Service containerization
- Moving to k8s will make it easier to upgrade Node (now and in the future).
- Split geoshapes into a separate service.
- Containerization made it much easier to refactor the service. There's a proof-of-concept port into TypeScript.
- Will lower the maintenance barrier.
- T321789: Node 14+
- Any earlier Node is already end-of-life.
- This upgrade will be a strategic requirement for moving to mapslibre or generally, upgrading upstream packages.
- T210815: Mapnik 3.1 which is the final "LTS" for the old stack.
- T326407: Plan what a mapslibre.org migration would look like
- Will be a lot of work if we keep our current schema and styles.
- Have pitched https://openmaptiles.org/ in the past. Has a very similar style available: https://openmaptiles.org/styles/#osm-bright
- Feasible. The API does allow us to port what has already been implemented.
- Need to keep language support in mind.
- Mini-investigation into benchmarking language support with the WebGL renderer which is part of mapslibre: T281230
- T263854: Client-side rendering of vector tiles
- Looked into client-side rendering in the past, the obstacle was a product concern of "anything that will change the experience".
- The performance tradeoff depends on loading a client library for maps rendering, maybe.
- Now that we have vector tiles available, it's a short leap to making a client-side rendering proof-of-concept.
- T274388: Separate geoshapes DB from map rendering DB using imposm capabilities
- Depends on the geoshapes split above.
- Will make it much easier to maintain the full-planet OSM sync database for rendering.
- Geoshape database will be smaller.
- Could look at enabling "nearby" on Android again.
- T323113: Current work to expand geoshapes at page parse time
- Is expected to take some load off of the servers.
- Could result in eliminating components eg. the mapdata library.
Devs agree that the most important next step is containerization. WMDE will have to drop out but we hope this work is continued.
This overview has been copied to https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Maps/Infrastructure_plans