Author of post here. One of the cool possibilities here is that Planetiler output is just another dataset, provided it's been converted to the S3-friendly PMTiles archive format (utility here: http://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles)

While Google Maps and MapBox let you customize the appearance of vector maps, you can only modify and remove data that already exists at a zoom level. A self-hosted solution allow products like yours to have 100% custom basemap datasets specific to the application, and serve overlay datasets (like those made with tippecanoe) through the same system.

It looks like the PMTiles is basically Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF, but for png.

Is this formant something that you expect will be widely supported in various clients? (e.g., there's serverless, and then there's static data)

bdon

Yep, it's inspired by COG as well as MBTiles, hence the name. Key differences are:

* like MBTiles it's agnostic to what individual tiles are. You can store vector data as SVG, Protobuf, raster PNGs, JPGs or even raw digital elevation models.

* It's not backwards compatible in the same way Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF is.

* It has a recursive index structure to avoid needing to load in huge indexes at once for large datasets (hundreds of millions of tiles).

* It is designed for remote HTTP range reads. If your application can instead directly access a filesytem, like on a mobile phone, MBTiles, which uses SQLite, is a more established solution.

The specification is open source on GitHub https://github.com/protomaps/PMTiles and is still evolving in response to user needs. I've created direct client support for Leaflet and MapLibre, and plan to work on OpenLayers next.