61–70 of 98 posts
> You can choose between maps and map styles provided by Esri and by HERE Technologies, I wonder why not use the HERE or Esri APIs directly? Is this just a marketing gimmick so Amazon can complete their offering? https://developer.here.com/
Honestly, I'm surprised that Amazon hasn't done this sooner. Google and to a lesser extent Apple both have a huge lead in this space. Amazon is one of the few companies that can afford the massive capital cost to create this kind of service. 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…
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...
Honestly, I'm surprised that Amazon hasn't done this sooner. Google and to a lesser extent Apple both have a huge lead in this space. Amazon is one of the few companies that can afford the massive capital cost to create this kind of service. 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…
Amazon acquired a mapping startup and built out a full 1st party maps product for the FirePhone launch. I'd assumed that was discarded along with the next-gen FirePhone - but it's possible bits and pieces of that effort ended up being integrated into this offering.
Pricing here: https://aws.amazon.com/location/pricing/ Scroll down to see it. No idea why Amazon always hides their service pricing on completely different pages.
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.
10x cheaper than Google (at least for geolocation). That's unexpected. GCP is usually cheaper than AWS.
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.
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
> You can choose between maps and map styles provided by Esri and by HERE Technologies, I wonder why not use the HERE or Esri APIs directly? Is this just a marketing gimmick so Amazon can complete their offering? https://developer.here.com/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because then Amazon can't track all your users. Imagine a delivery company uses Amazon's API for its in-truck apps or route planning. Amazon drinks your data, it drinks it up.
Do you have a source for this assertion? I assuming the privacy policy or terms of use would have this spelled out fairly clearly.
Because I don't think a lot of people know about it, I'll mention pelias here. If you have 16 GB RAM and 600 GB of disk, you can have a free, open source, pre-populated geo database that covers the entire planet. 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,…