birdstheword5

I’ve seen people mentioning on HN and elsewhere that raster tiles are now an outdated approach and that everything should be vector tiles. I'm talking only about displaying vector datasets here, not raster datasets.

Vector tiles look crisp and make zooming + rotating the map a much nicer experience. On mobile in particular they are brilliant. However, for apps meant to work in desktop/laptop-based browsers, I've noticed a few things:

- Vector tiles are CPU/ GPU intensive on the user's browser. On my work and personal computers, they are sometimes slower to draw than raster tiles.

- Because of point 1, you have to be careful about what data is shown at a particular zoom level. For example, you often don't get the same level of detail when comparing vector and raster OpenStreetMap tiles for the same zoom level.

- I often have performance issues when displaying national-level datasets with vector tiles. Tools like Tippecanoe help here, but there's only so much it can drop/ simplify. If a raster tile service isn't performing well at low zoom, I simply pre-generate the tiles.

- Overall I feel like I don't have to be as “clever” with my data to make the map perform well when using raster tiles.

My feeling is that they will both vector and raster tiles will continue to be used into the future, perhaps even 50/ 50. Am I in the minority here?

An Azure Cloud Architect has joined our company. They are recommending that all our web apps that are currently deployed in Azure App Services/ VMs should be (gradually) split up into Azure Functions going forward.

I'm skeptical - I was under the impression that serverless was for small "burstable" apps with relatively low traffic, or background processing.

The two products I work on are both REST APIs that send and receive data from a user interface (react) with roughly 60 API routes each. They have about 100 concurrent users but those users use the apps heavily.

The consensus on the internet seems to be "serverless has its use cases" but it's not clear to me what those use cases are. Are the apps I'm working on good use cases?