Open global Valhalla server landed!

[nilsnolde]

FOSSGIS e.V. approved our (@TimMcCauley, @kevinkreiser and me) proposal (on German only, sorry..) to fund a global Valhalla server, for at least one year. Among other open-source services, they already host the global OSRM demo service since Mapbox shut down theirs, which is also used on openstreetmap.org.

On the technical side we'll run one server continuously building tiles for the planet (at around a 2-day interval since there's "only" 16 threads on the server). As a "service" server answering requests we'll only deploy a single server for now and await users' feedback. That'll need fairly strict rate limiting, so it won't be usable for any production service for third parties. However, we do hope to eventually bring back the service to openstreetmap.org as a third alternative, where it has been before, in Mapzen days. The feasibility and acceptance of that proposal will be determined further down the road.

We aim to have all endpoints live except for /transit_available and verbose /status. Limits will have to be fairly strict for the computationally expensive ones like /expansion, /centroid or /matrix, the others will be kept at generous levels. The Tilezen/Nextzen elevation tiles from Amazon Open Data (kudos where they are deserved) will be available for /height & costing.

That's great news, and we're very grateful to FOSSGIS e.V. for the funding. It'll be an important step to increase Valhalla's reach in the community, hopefully attracting more contributors along the way.

[nilsnolde]

UPDATE:

sometime last week we finally finished the server & software setup, Valhalla is now available at https://valhalla1.openstreetmap.de!

We published a small news article on German on FOSSGIS news (English coming up soon).

The gist is: we rate limit to 1 call/user/sec and 100 calls/sec total. Service limits are a bit stricter than the defaults as well. That's about all one needs to know.

Happy routing!

[buchasia]

Hallo @nilsnolde,

the /height endpoint is still not active. Will it be included in this server?

Thank you!

[nilsnolde]

Yeah we could do that soonish.. never used it personally, but we got the disk space for it. @kevinkreiser you think it’s ok for our resources? Not sure what to expect in terms of performance hit without looking into it deeper.

[kevinkreiser]

@nilsnolde its incredibly performant if you use uncompressed sources, in that mode you will not even notice it impacting other requests

[nilsnolde]

Ok perfect, thought so. we can use uncompressed tiles, it has a few TB.

[nilsnolde]

Ok perfect, thought so. I’ll transfer the builders tiles then to the service I’m the next days. We can use uncompressed tiles, it has a few TB. Thanks @buchasia kinda forgot about it!

[buchasia]

Thank you @nilsnolde and @kevinkreiser :)

[nilsnolde]

and as a thanks the server crashed due to open file limit 🙄 might take a while to get it sorted, can't ssh into it anymore so FOSSGIS has to hard reboot

[kevinkreiser]

doh sorry i totally didnt think to warn you about setting the ulimits

[buchasia]

@nilsnolde I hope it did not lead to a lot of work for you?

[nilsnolde]

it did, but it's not your fault;) should be online again today, we only could re-configure the server yesterday.

[nilsnolde]

it's up again and /height is active 🎉

curl --request GET \
  --url https://valhalla1.openstreetmap.de/height \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data '{
	"shape": [
		{
			"lon": 86.924932,
			"lat": 27.987892
		}
	]
}'

[farfromrefug]

@nilsnolde i am releasing an app for iOS and Android which uses https://valhalla1.openstreetmap.de for elevation profile and some route stats. Are you ok with that? Do you need me to add any header?
I do use Cache Control to try and limit the calls.

[nilsnolde]

A proper User-Agent header is always appreciated, esp for these kind of "mass" deployments. I'd just be curious if it'll be OSS?

[farfromrefug]

@nilsnolde yes it is oss. https://github.com/Akylas/alpimaps. I Will add a User-Agent with AlpiMaps

[nilsnolde]

Cool, please go ahead:)