Backends

TiTiler

TiTiler, by Development Seed, is “a modern dynamic tile server built on top of FastAPI and Rasterio/GDAL”.

Under the hood

This extension was initially designed around TiTiler, so its internal interfaces currently more closely match TiTiler’s interfaces.

xpublish-tiles

Xpublish, by earthmover, is a tool to “publish Xarray datasets to the web”. xpublish-tiles is a plugin to serve time images with the OGC Tiles API.

Like TiTiler, it’s a dynamic tile server using FastAPI.

Unlike TiTiler, xpublish-tiles uses a GDAL-free rendering pipeline under the hood. Additionally, the Xpublish API is built around DataArrays, not Datasets.

xpublish-tiles claims to be faster, but lacks some features like support for rendering algorithms that TiTiler supports, e.g. hillshade rendering.

Read more about xpublish-tiles and how it compares to TiTiler on the earthmover blog!

Under the hood

Xpublish speaks in Datasets, not DataArrays. Since this extension was designed to work with DataArrays, we convert them to Datasets before handing them off the Xpublish.