Cloud-Native Geospatial Formats Explained: COG, GeoParquet, PMTiles & More
Last Updated: 13 Nov, 2026
What Are Cloud-Native GIS File Formats? A Developer’s Guide If you have ever built a geospatial pipeline, you know the pain of the “download-first” bottleneck. Traditionally, if your application needed a 500x500 pixel bounding box from a 15 GB satellite scene—or wanted to filter ten rows from a 4 GB municipal parcel dataset—you had to download the entire file, parse it into memory, and then slice out the piece you actually cared about.