R&D into self-hosting .pbf tiles for offline map usage

[Michael-R-Dickinson]

Currently the way that map-tiles are rendered is that they are either retrieved from an online API, or obtained from a separate local-hosted tile server, which ends up being a good amount of work involved . We can look into how these tiles could be instead directly hosted on GCOM instead.

Advantages:

• Less in-field setup work required, potentially less debugging in the case that the separate tile-hosting source doesn't work.
• One less process to run on the localhost machine, less complexity, greater chance of being able to bundle FE and BE together in a docker container or something like that.

Drawbacks:

• Could be potentially very complex to setup. These map tiles are served in very special formats through layers of JSON metadata.
• Is the benefit-cost ratio worth it? Currently I'm thinking that we can spend a bit of time looking into this self-hosting solution for a couple weeks, but time is definitely better spent looking at something else if there is no good progress after e.g. a month

Alternatives:

• Maybe we could bundle GCOM BE, FE and the tile-hosting server all into one docker image for ease of setup.