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Integrate 3D Tiling into Custom Solutions with Cesium ion Self-Hosted

Matthew Amato

We are excited to announce the Cesium ion Self-Hosted 3D Tiling Pipeline. Currently in early access, Cesium ion Self-Hosted allows integrators and application developers to easily incorporate 3D Tiling and hosting into their custom solutions.

Here are just a few of the things you can do with Cesium ion Self-Hosted:

  • Build robust geospatial applications that support scalable on-demand 3D tiling and run on your local network, private cloud, or in disconnected environments.
  • Create automated and scalable pipelines that tile data from disparate legacy systems as it becomes available and serves it as standardized 3D Tiles.
  • Run 3D tiling at edge locations as soon as data is collected.

Initially targeting Kubernetes, Cesium ion Self-Hosted includes:

  • A 3D Tiling Pipeline container image, identical to the image used in Cesium ion SaaS but tuned for self-hosted environments.
  • An all new asset server container image for serving 3D Tiles, imagery, and terrain created by the pipeline.
  • A configurable Helm Chart for deploying to Kubernetes and enabling tiling and hosting of 3D Tiles at scale.
  • Tutorials, reference documentation, and guidance for building custom applications in Kubernetes.
  • Documentation for running the images from the command line or with other orchestrators outside of Kubernetes.
Cesium ion Self-Hosted helm chart

The reference architecture created by the Cesium ion Helm chart.

During the early access period, Cesium ion Self-Hosted is available to all current Cesium ion 3D Tiling Pipeline users as part of their existing subscription at no additional cost. In many cases, switching to Cesium ion Self Hosted can allow you to replace the command line tools with container images and Kubernetes clusters.

This is the first step in Cesium’s roadmap towards a full turnkey self-hosted version of Cesium ion, complete with REST API and user interface. In addition to supporting Kubernetes in on-premise and cloud environments, we also plan to target native support for AWS, Azure, and other cloud providers.

The landing page for Cesium ion Self-Hosted

The landing page features a new Cesium ion asset server which includes a development mode to simplify browsing and viewing data during development.

Check out the documentation to learn more.

If you are already a Cesium ion 3D Tiling Pipeline user, download Cesium ion Self-Hosted to try it out yourself.