What Are the Costs VS Utility of the Tile Servers to the OSM Community?

We went over the numbers last time Steve viewed this as an issue. The 2024 budget cost for the standard tile layer was €10,288.59. The 2025 cost is likely to be about €5,000. Restricting tile access to osm.org would likely result in no cost savings, and potentially an increase. Currently the credits for one of the sponsored tile servers also cover other tile layer activities like logging, and if we restricted tile access to osm.org we would be less likely to get sponsorships in the future.

We have upcoming sponsorships that may reduce the 2025 cost to about €2000.

On the time to manage the service, on the ops side the largest cost has been fixing bugs that the vandalism earlier this year exposed. We would have had to do this if tiles were from osm.org only. We have some ongoing work to move the Fastly config to OpenTofu as part of IaC work.

I looked at our minutes from this year. The work related to the standard tile layer service have been

  • capacity planning,
  • fastly image recoding,
  • getting replacement AARNet sponsored servers,
  • upgrading old CPUs,
  • AWS credit renewal,
  • vandalism correction measures, and
  • serving error images on blocked tile requests.

Outside of ops, the biggest use of volunteer time I know of has been the DWG responding to questions about vandalism. This would likely reduce if the standard tile layer were restricted to osm.org only.

The biggest time cost has been repeatedly explaining to the same user that their data on the cost of the standard tile layer is incorrect.

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