This discussion is great to see! We’ve been talking about this article at work, the only thing I’d point out that hasn’t been said is that there is some complexity to designing with and managing the other renderer assets besides tiles (i.e. styles, markers, textures, icons, fonts). Most of this complexity is well documented if you know where to look, but will trip you up at least the first time you set up a serverless mapping stack, so buyer beware.

The trickiest of these assets is the stylesheet, necessary for the renderer to know how to draw the data in tiles. The article mentions Maputnik, which works great for quick prototyping and the production deadlines of newsrooms, but limiting once your map, application, and or tiles get to a certain level of complexity.