Guides · 8 min read
Geospatial Cloud Storage 101: Formats, Tiles, and When to Use What
Shapefiles, GeoJSON, COG, vector tiles—when to use which format and how to serve them without running your own tile server.
Choosing the right format for your geospatial data affects performance, compatibility, and cost. Here’s a quick guide to the formats you’ll meet in the cloud and when to use each.
Raster: GeoTIFF and COG
GeoTIFF is the standard for raster imagery and DEMs. For cloud use, prefer Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG): it’s still a GeoTIFF, but organized so clients can request only the windows they need. That means fast zoom and pan without downloading the whole file. COG is ideal for large imagery, elevation, and any raster you want to stream by extent.
Vector: GeoJSON, Shapefile, and vector tiles
GeoJSON is great for APIs and web apps: human-readable, widely supported. Shapefile is legacy but still common; many tools can read it from URLs. For smooth rendering at scale, vector tiles (e.g. MVT) are the answer: pre-sliced by zoom level so clients request only what’s visible. Use GeoJSON for small datasets and APIs; use vector tiles for basemaps and large vector layers.
Serving without a tile server
You don’t have to run MapServer or GeoServer to serve these. Modern object storage can host COGs and vector tiles; clients that support range requests or tile URLs can consume them directly. That keeps architecture simple and keeps egress as the only variable—or, with the right provider, removes egress from the equation entirely.